


alone by your side, i was flying

by strangetowns



Category: Nothing Much to Do
Genre: M/M, Swearing, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 19:00:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 27,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3540509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangetowns/pseuds/strangetowns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Love happens to the best and the worst of us. And sometimes, it can be messy, and breathtaking and spectacular, and you don’t fall into it so much as you collide into the other person. And there’s fireworks and heat and ups and downs. And it’s beautiful. It’s really beautiful.</p><p>And sometimes it happens real casual like, you know? Sometimes it happens slowly and quietly, so slowly and so quietly that you don’t even know it’s happened until you’re right in the middle of it.</p><p>But just because it’s sneaked up on you doesn’t mean that it means any less.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Love is Painted Gold

**Author's Note:**

> Alternatively: in the spaces between what is captured on camera, Pedro develops a severe case of emotional constipation, and Balthazar suffers in silence.
> 
> Disclaimer – I am not from New Zealand; apologies for the discrepancies that might arise from this.
> 
> And finally, I’ve borrowed the title from a song by the Crystal Fighters called “[At Home](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruakMoSvVsY)”. Because I can’t come up with my own titles. Or my own characters, apparently. Go figure.

[ **I. Love is Painted Gold** ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OT2M1r-XyM)

_The moment we forgot we were just good friends,_  
_I moved my arm, your face went red again  
_ _One more bus home, another silent weekend_

-

You wake up from a dream that feels like a nightmare to the sound of the world shaking apart.

No, wait, that’s just your phone.

Damn.

Barely conscious, the hazy reaches of sleep reluctant to leave your head, you grope blindly at your bedside table, latch onto your angrily vibrating phone, and bring it in front of your face. The words DON PEDRO flash across the screen, unmissable. You briefly contemplate throwing your phone out the window. For a blissful second, the thought seems like a logical course of action. Then you actually think about it, and decide picking up the call might just end less catastrophically. Though, to be fair, one can never really tell with Pedro Donaldson.

“’Lo?”

“Balthazar, you bastard, are you still in bed?”

You groan, bringing your hand up to your eyes to shield them from the sun. “Definitely not.”

“Don’t lie, it’s not a nice color on you.” You stick your tongue out before you remember he can’t see you. “I’m going to be over there in ten minutes, and if you’re not up I’m dragging you into my car, PJ’s and all.”

“I’d like to see you try,” you say, though you’re fully aware that such a feat is possible. It has happened several times in the past.

“Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, and guess what?”

“What?”

“It’s the first day of the last year of school!” With a whoop loud enough to force you to hold your phone away from your ear, Pedro hangs up.

The first day of the last year of school.

You stare at the ceiling, the words echoing in your ears, and the beginning of the end washes over you, no longer a distant thing of the future. Almost tangible. It leaves a taste in the back of your mouth, and you can’t really tell if you like it or not. You can’t really tell what you’re feeling about it at all.

It’s too early for this shit, you think. Too early to think about the ending of things you’ve known your whole life, and too early to think about the beginning of things you’ve never experienced before. Too early to be paralyzed with the fear, or the relief, or the thousand other feelings you could spend your whole life trying to decipher and never being able to.

What were you dreaming about, you wonder. You can’t really remember all that well. There’s a lingering feeling in the back of your head, though, sweet and beautiful and poisonous. Maybe you don’t want to know.

And then your thoughts latch onto well-styled hair, and smooth white skin, and suddenly you know all too well. You should have known better, anyway. You dream about the same thing every night, don’t you?

“God,” you say to your ceiling, and you wish you could sink into your blankets. You wish you could drown in them forever.

It’s a miracle that, ten minutes later, you find yourself on your porch as Pedro’s half-alive, mostly rusted truck sputters into the driveway. You barely remember how you got there.

“Balthazar!” Pedro sticks his head out the window, the truck still running, bless his soul. “Come on, you beautiful fucker!”

You adjust the straps of your bag on your shoulder and make your way to the car. “So you admit it,” you say as you climb in.

“Admit what?”

You grin, making sure he catches it in the mirror. “That I’m beautiful.”

He snorts, takes his hand off the steering wheel and, though distracted by the road, manages to shove your shoulder with enough force to make your whole body rock. “Don’t kid yourself.”

“Hey, you need two hands for driving.”

“Shove it,” Pedro says automatically. You can’t help but laugh in his face, and it doesn’t take much for him to join in as well.

The silence that the laughter leaves in its wake is familiar, one you both have inhabited countless times in the past. You can’t remember when they stopped being awkward; you just know the sound of silence is not nearly as comfortable with anyone else as it is with him.

“So Ursula’s doing this video project after school today,” Pedro says finally. He’s usually the first to break the moment, isn’t he? You don’t really mind, can’t remember the last time you did. “Says she wants to ask us a bunch of questions.”

“Questions? What kind?”

Pedro shrugs. “Dunno. Reckon it’ll be fun though, yeah? You game?”

Not really. “Yeah, why not.” With him, maybe.

You look over just in time to catch Pedro’s face breaking into a smile, and he’s the kind of guy to smile all the time but not the kind of guy to smile like _this_ very often, so open and unguarded, the kind of look you don’t see as often as you like. You’ve spent your whole life chasing after smiles like those, and they’re never around for very long but you’d do anything – _anything_ – to be there for them whenever they come. You’re surprised – surprised, but grateful – that you have been allowed to bear witness to this one.

“Brilliant,” he says. “Great.” And before you can really help yourself, your heart stutters in your chest, overwhelmed with – with _something_ – and you hate yourself, a little, for slipping hold of your control even for just this one second.

Because you can’t ever lose it. Not ever. Not even a single inch.

“We’re here,” Pedro says, and as he pulls into the parking spot his smile fades away with the slowing speed of the car.

It was nice while it lasted, you think.

The rest of the day feels insignificant, inconsequential compared to those precious few minutes in the car. You can’t really bring yourself to pay attention to anything else around you, not the teacher’s pseudo-enthusiastic voice, not the manufactured chaos of your classmates around you, certainly not the minutia of the classes themselves. None of your friends are in your classes, anyway, so nothing’s really keeping your attention. There’s a song stuck inside your head, circling around itself in haphazard beats, and your foot taps the whole day, waiting impatiently until the moment you can get home and get it out of there.

That’s the thing about music – to you, it’s less a hobby and more a compulsion, less an interest and more a way of life. Less something you like to do and more something you have to do. It fills you up, from your toes to the bottom of your lungs to the scattered thoughts in your head, and it’s everything and nothing all at once. You breathe it; you live in it every waking second.

After school ends, you find Pedro sitting on a ledge in the courtyard, his head leaning against a nearby pole. Ursula is nowhere to be seen.

“Hey, so how was your day?” you say as you step onto the ledge beside him. “And, er, where’s Ursula?”

“She’s got others to interview, I’d bet,” Pedro says, standing up. “And it was fine, I suppose. Better now that you’re here.”

“Don’t say things like that.”

Pedro looks up at you, his brow furrowing. “Why?”

Before you can respond, Ursula enters the courtyard. “Sorry I’m running late, guys,” she says, hurriedly setting up her camera. “Beatrice held me up. Said something about how all the invasive questions were unfair? She made me answer some myself.”

“Yup,” Pedro says, nodding thoughtfully. “Sounds like her, all right.”

“Anyway, just wanted to let you guys know, if you want to check out the video, I’ll have it up in a month or maybe two – still quite a few people to interview. All right, so, um, say your names when you’re ready. Camera’s on now, but I can just cut out whatever’s unnecessary.”

“Right, Pedro Donaldson.” And just like that, he’s broken into a winning smile, from nothing to everything in seconds flat. You’d always been amazed by how quickly he could change his emotions like that. Until the day you realized it wasn’t his emotions that were changing.

“Oh.” You realize suddenly that you’re still standing on the ledge and jump down. “Uh, Balthazar.”

The rest of the interview continues uneventfully. To be honest, the questions were fairly innocuous, for what you’d been led to imagine. You’d half-expected being forced to share your first crush or something.

As you walk back to the car, though, you notice the crease between Pedro’s eyebrows, almost impossible to distinguish for anyone who is less familiar with him than you. It seems he does not share your opinions. But his lips are pursed, and he doesn’t say anything, so you figure if he decides to share with you what it is, he can do it on his own terms. It was never your style to push him into anything he didn’t want.

So you get into the passenger seat and you keep your silence, though the unspoken questions burn in your throat.

The road passes by, and it’s as quiet as your thoughts.

“Did you mean it?” Pedro says suddenly. You feel your head snap over to look at him, though his eyes are determinedly fixed on the road. Besides a whiteness on his knuckles that implies a tight grip on the steering wheel, there’s nothing that indicates how he feels, or what he’s talking about. “What you said, back there?”

You blink. “Er. Said what, exactly?” As far as you can remember, there wasn’t anything life-shattering that was said by either of you.

“Your favorite quote.” A squeeze on the wheel. “’Love will not betray you, dismay or enslave you. It will set you free.’ Something like that.”

Oh.

“You really think that it’s true?” he says, and it’s only six words that are spoken but you’ve always had a thing for being able to tell what he really meant in far fewer. And you wish you didn’t. You really do.

“Of course.” In an attempt to shake off the heaviness in the car, you continue, “Are you worried about your love life? That’s a surprise.”

“Not worried about mine,” he says quietly.

No.

Of course he isn’t.

-

_He was the most excited you’d ever seen him when he pulled into your driveway for the first time with his very own car. Before then, you’d had to rely on harried parents and long walks, but you both knew the freedom this implied. The power to go wherever you wanted, without having to schedule plans and secure parental permission days in advance; unfettered desires more easily indulged in than ever before._

_“Anywhere,” he said when you approached the gloriously rusty truck, his face flushed with happiness. “Anywhere you want, I can take you there.”_

_Slowly, you opened the door and climbed into the passenger seat. The whole time, you could feel his eyes on you, eager with anticipation. You carefully remained silent until you pulled your seatbelt home. His undivided attention was something you savored greatly, at the time._

_“I don’t care,” you said finally. “Just drive.”_

_With a loud whoop of appreciation, he backed out of the driveway, the sun falling across his face as radiant as the smile that split his lips. You had to turn to the window to hide your own behind your palm, had to focus on the fields that passed by so that you didn’t have to face the whole of his brightness. Most days, it was already too much, but today he was just overwhelmingly, wonderfully blinding._

_When you’d gotten into the car, the radio had been blaring a loud top 40 song that was somehow appropriate for this impromptu exaltation. Soon, though, it switched to a soft track, strummed guitar and hushed vocals. It was a song for getting lost, for lazy driving days. You knew the lyrics well, whispered them under your breath before you went to bed some nights. It was a song that made your heart ache._

_He became as quiet as the music, but when you looked over at him you could see the corners of his mouth still upturned. The afternoon sunlight lit the edges of his profile into sharp relief, setting the tips of his golden hair aflame. His eyes had never seemed so full; it had never been so hard for you to breathe._

_He only had one hand on the steering wheel. The other was resting lightly on the gear shift. Dangerously close to your own. In a brief, heartstopping moment, the urge to rest your hand on his seized your mind. Before you could do anything to stop yourself, you wondered what it would be like to press your sweaty palms together and–_

_Just –_

_The guitar played quietly from the radio speakers._

_Your head snapped back to the window, and your pulse felt as loud as your thoughts, and that damned song was still playing, and the emotions you wanted to swallow down like so many pills wouldn’t seem to go away. You could feel the heat rushing to your cheeks before you could ever hope to stop it. And everything was too much. Everything was always too much, with him. And that’s why you turned away from him._

_He noticed._

_“All right?” You couldn’t bear the concern in his voice. It was supposed to be a good day, and you were ruining it already._

_Then you looked over at him, and he couldn’t keep his eyes off the road for very long but in that briefest of brief moments he was looking at you too, and there was nothing in his face but contentment, satisfaction,_ happiness _. And you wanted nothing more but to live in that happiness with him too._

_You wanted it more than life._

_But there were no words to express that to him, and so the hills passed by in silence._

-

You realize, with a start, that a song filled with wistful sounding guitar and hazy vocals is playing on the radio. It’s not the same song. It’s not the same song, but it still makes your heart hurt.

“Pedro,” you say. “Don Pedro.”

He clicks his tongue between his teeth. “I told you to stop calling me that.”

“You can’t tell me what to do,” you say. “And you can’t feel guilty for things that aren’t your fault.”

He snorts. “Yeah, not my fault. Right.”

You suffocate your momentary annoyance. He has a good heart, you remind yourself. He has the best heart of anyone you’ve ever known.

“Look, if you’re still thinking about what happened yesterday, it’s fine. I already told you, I don’t want things to change between us.”

“And they won’t!” he says quickly, taking a hand off the wheel to run it through his hair. “They haven’t. You’re my best friend, you know that, Balthazar? But I can’t just not worry about my best friend. And we’ve kind of just – pushed this thing under the rug, you know? But I’d really, really hate for you to feel like you couldn’t talk to me about this. Or anything, really. Just – I want you to know that if there’s anything on your mind at all, I’m here for you. I feel like I don’t tell you that enough.”

You smile softly. “I’m not a guy of many words.”

“So that may be,” he mutters. “But still.”

God, this boy. This infuriating, damnable boy. Half of you wants to reach over and reassuringly ruffle his hair. Half of you wants to embrace him, bury your face in his chest and breathe all you can of him in. For obvious reasons, neither are options.

“I don’t want to stop being your friend, Pedro,” you say finally, putting as much truth into the words as you can. Because god, you mean it. You mean it more than you can say.

“Yeah,” he says under his breath, so quietly you can barely catch the words. “Me neither.”

Before you can respond, you realize you’re pulling into your driveway. The guitar fades away into cloudy-sounding synth. Your heart feels just as overcast.

“See you tomorrow, Balthazar,” he says as you get out.

“’F course,” is your response.

That’s one thing you can count on, at least, isn’t it? The day you don’t see Pedro, the day you don’t stand by his side is the day the world will end. You can’t even fathom such a thing happening.

And what would it be like, to never see Pedro Donaldson again?

That’s why what you said earlier is the truth. Because you know, in your heart and bones and all the parts of you that are deeper than you can even feel, that you could never give him up, and to be like this, to count him among your friends and to be there for him in even the smallest of ways, is colossally better than nothing at all. It is more than enough, and more than you expected.

It always has been. 

-

 _You said love was painted gold,_  
_Like all things growing old,  
_ _The paint peels and slowly falls_


	2. Since I've Seen You Smile

**[II. Since I’ve Seen You Smile](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCkT4K-hppE) **

_Well, it's been a long time, long time now_  
_Since I've seen you smile_  
_And I'll gamble away my fright  
_ _And I'll gamble away my time_

-

The thing about Balthazar is that, in the five years that you have known him, you have never seen him without a smile on his face.

At the beginning of knowing him, you didn’t think it were possible that he actually felt those smiles; you didn’t think it was possible for anyone to be that genuinely happy all the time. But you’ve spent years under his tutelage, learning the art of deciphering the curves of his lips, and if there’s one thing you don’t associate with him, it’s falsehood.

You think, probably, he’s one of those rare people who really is that delighted by the world around them. And you envy him for it.

Having said that, since school started, something’s seemed a little off with him, and it bothers you that you can’t put your finger on it.

Sometimes, you run through all the things that seem wrong versus all the things you know about him. He’s been quiet, but he’s always had a preference for silence. He’s seemed out of it, but the music in his head has always been a distraction. He doesn’t hang out with you as much, but none of your classes match up, anyway.

It doesn’t make a difference. No matter how you think about it, you are still left with a sense of vague unsettlement, a sort of tension surrounding him, that you just can’t explain.

One day, he greets you at lunch with a smile. The rest of the group hasn’t gotten there yet, but you have to admit the quiet that results from an absence of Beatrice and Ben is somewhat refreshing.

“So sick and tired of math,” you say, swinging your leg over the bench. “I’m pretty sure if the subject was a real person, he would be the most annoying ass in all of human history.” You shake your head as you pull your lunch from your bag. “Him and physics, probably.”

“Well, hello to you, too.” He laughs, though he doesn’t look up. His fingers tap against the surface of the table, quiet but impulsive. You notice he doesn’t have any food in front of him. Did he finish already, or did he just not bring anything?

In place of food, he has a notebook in front of him, open to a page covered in barely legible scrawl. “What do you have there?” you say, nodding at the notebook in between bites of your sandwich.

“Oh.” He looks down at what you're pointing at, smiling again. Once again, you get the vague sense that something’s off. But what? It’s not like he’s smiling any less than usual, or acting any different. “Working on a new song. But, uh, lyrics aren’t coming easy to me this time. Might be a while before I finish.”

“Aha,” you say. Briefly, you glance at the page, though it’s hard enough to make out Balthazar’s handwriting even without trying to read it upside down as you are. You just barely make out the words, _it seems about time_. “Am I allowed to know what it’s about?”

“Nah, nah.” He shakes his head vigorously, and scoops the notebook into his bag. “It’s a surprise.”

You feel yourself frown. Before you can ask what exactly he means by that, you feel a hand clap onto your shoulder. “Pedro!” Ben says, his mouth inches away from your ear. You wince as he pulls away and sits down heavily next to you. “And Balthazar. Early to lunch, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, so I can enjoy some peace here before you clowns barge in,” you say.

“There’s only one of me.”

“Exactly.”

“Hey,” Balthazar says, “what do you have there?”

Ben looks down at the fruit in his hand. “Oh, this little thing? Only the finest mango I could get my hands on.”

“I’m pretty sure you just picked the first one you laid your eyes on,” Claudio says as he joins the table.

“Hey, I’ll have you know, I’ve done my research, I’m the closest you’ve got to a mango connoisseur!”

“Do such things even exist?” If anyone else had asked that, they would have been sarcastic about it, but Claudio seems genuinely bemused.

“What doesn’t exist?” Beatrice calls out from the adjacent table, where she and the other girls have set up camp.

You can almost sense Ben’s cocky smirk, though he faces away from you, as he replies, “Your soul.”

What an idiot. With a roll of your eyes, you turn to Balthazar. You’d hoped you might be able to talk to him privately, but you suppose when the only times you see him is with the others, and car rides are never conducive for what you want to ask him, the best place for a conversation like this is now, when no one is likely to pay attention to you.

“Hey,” you say. Not quietly, because you’re pretty sure even if you screamed your words Ben and Beatrice would still pay you no mind, the way they’re currently going at it.

“Hey.” A beaming smile. It looks real. So what the hell do you think is wrong?

You pull a granola bar out of your bag and place it next to him. “You really should eat.”

The corners of his eyes crinkle. “Thanks, man,” he says, and takes the offer without complaint or protests. He gives and takes so quietly you almost don’t notice how unapologetic he is about it.

“Er…” You purse your lips. “Just wanted to ask if you’re all right?”

He blinks once at you, then twice. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I reckon I’m fine. Why d’you ask?”

You sigh, running a hand through your hair. “I dunno, I just…” You decide fuck it, and go for the truth. “Can’t help but feel like something’s wrong. Is all.”

He nods thoughtfully. “But why does it have to be me?”

You frown. “What?”

“I mean…” he pauses to exhale a small laugh. “Why does it have to be me, that something’s wrong with? Maybe it’s you.”

You snort. “Okay, now you’ve lost me.”

He shakes his head, smiling. “Just think about it, ‘kay?”

Before you can think of a response, you hear Beatrice’s voice, clear and piercing through the background noise. “What are you doing, Benedick?”

Good lord, you think. This ought to be interesting.

-

_You met him in the back of a mostly empty classroom half an hour before school started._

_It was back before you could drive yourself to school and your parents had to drop you off before they went to work. Through primary school, you’d always been the first person in the room. Not that you minded, back then. Back then, you thrived on the silence. So it was rather strange to discover someone who beat you to it. You didn’t recognize him, either; you’d probably attended different primaries. Strange._

_Strange, perhaps, but not altogether unwelcome._

_The first thing you noticed about him was how quiet he was. In fact, you’d mistaken yourself for alone when you first got there, for the first few minutes. But then you noticed a small boy – smaller than you, anyway – sitting with his back off the chair but still hunched over, sleeves too big for his hands resting on the desk, hair falling into eyes._

_And smiling. You remember that he smiled at you from the first moment you met._

_“I didn’t realize anyone else would be here,” was the first thing you ever said to him._

_“I could say the same to you.”_

_“Usually, I’m the first one to class.”_

_He laughed. “Sorry for taking your place, man. Couldn’t really help it, to be fair.”_

_You shook your head, charmed by the sound of his laugh. “No, not at all,” you said as you pulled up a chair next to him, mindful of his beat-up bag. As you did so, you sneaked a glance at it, your gaze attracted by the colors and buttons that were scattered over its surface. You could barely decipher any of them, and decided this fact made him someone interesting. Perhaps even worth knowing. “What’s your name?”_

_“Balthazar Jones.” He grinned. “And yours?”_

_You stuck your hand out. “Pedro Donaldson.”_

_“Pedro Donaldson, eh? Donaldson. Pedro Donnie. Don Pedro, haha.”_

_He reached out and gripped your palm briefly, but firmly. Though his fingers were thin, they were long and had a sort of strength in them; as they brushed your skin, you thought you could feel callouses._

_“Don’t call me that,” you said, sticking your tongue out at him, only to be answered by more laughter. “Do you play music?”_

_He didn’t just smile, then; he beamed. The expression on his face reminded you vaguely of sunlight._

_“Yeah, I dabble in it here and there,” he said, shrugging his shoulders in a poor attempt at nonchalance._

_“Liar.” You pointed to a button on his bag that had a row of music notes and the words MUSIC IS MY LIFE in black bold letters against white._

_The laugh that left him was more of an exhale than a sound of mirth, an expulsion of air from the lungs that almost felt sheepish. “Yeah, I guess you’re right, aren’t you?”_

_“Aren’t I?” you said. “Sing for me.”_

_He quirked an eyebrow. “Only just met, and already trying to take advantage of me.”_

_“Who says anyone is trying to take advantage of you? I’m the sweetest guy you’ve ever met!” For effect, you brought your hands up to your cheek and batted your eyelashes at him._

_He only rolled his eyes at you and laughed quietly._

_“I am glad to meet you,” he said, and when he smiled you believed the truth of his words. You really did._

_Well. Maybe it wasn’t you who was the sweet one._

-

You don’t know how you manage to escape the lunch period with your insanity intact. Honestly, you’re not sure if you do.

But the rest of your classes pass you by in a sweet, silent blur. You barely remember a thing you were supposed to learn by the time you’re on your way to the football pitch for practice.

You suppose part of the reason has to be that Balthazar’s words are still rolling around in your head, somewhat to your annoyance. Not just what he said earlier, though that’s certainly prevalent, but also that thing he quoted for the interview you did with Ursula. It was a pretty thing that he said. He’d looked straight at you when he said it.

Truth be told, he’s been saying odd things here and there to you, now that you think about it. Things that you can’t really make much sense of. Like the time he poked fun at you for “admitting” that he was beautiful. Or one time, you asked him to get you a cup of coffee, and before he turned away he said, “Anything for you, Don Pedro.” Or what when he wagged his eyebrows at you the last time you complimented him?

You get the weird sense that he wants you to put these weird, fragmented pieces together like a puzzle. But that’s ridiculous; Balthazar’s not one for mind games. He’s more likely to just say something that’s on his mind if he wants you to know it.

So that settles it, you decide about halfway through practice. You shouldn’t think more of things than you should. And, anyway, there’s so much else to worry about. The football season, for one. The election for student leader, for another. And also figuring out what the hell you want to do with your life, after you graduate. No time to be concerned about something that doesn’t need to be worried about.

Wait. That’s a good point.

What the hell _are_ you going to do with your life after you graduate?

“What the hell are you going to do with your life after you graduate?” you say to Balthazar as you get into the car that afternoon.

He looks at you. “Excuse me?”

You shake your head. “Sorry,” you say. “I mean – have you thought about it a lot? What you want to do after high school’s over?”

He tilts his head to the side. “And what’s brought this on?”

“Nothing in particular. Just – been thinking all day. I realized we haven’t actually talked about it, have we? And I figured I’m kind of curious.”

You start the car and pull out of the parking lot. It’s a familiar motion, now, something you might do in your sleep if it wasn’t a completely mad idea to drive in your sleep. You think it’s the first of a whole list of things it didn’t occur you to miss, when you leave Messina, until you leave it.

“Hm.” You glance over at him just in time to see his brow furrow thoughtfully. “Yeah, I’d reckon I’ve given it a thought or two. College, yeah, maybe. But I wouldn’t mind taking some time to work on music stuff. Write some songs, travel through the country.” He shrugs his slender shoulders. “Who knows where I’ll be in a year? It’ll be interesting to see where we all end up, won’t it? But what about you?”

“What about me?”

He laughs, shaking his head. “Where do you think you’ll be? In a year.”

“Mm. College, probably. Most likely.”

You purse your lips. Why does it seem like such an unsatisfactory answer?

You brake to a stop in front of a red light, enough time to glance over at Balthazar. He’s looking away from you, now, out the window with his chin resting on his hand, but in the half-reflection in the glass you can see his fingers barely covering up a soft smile.

It occurs to you, then, what exactly’s been bothering you.

When was the last time he smiled while looking at you?

- 

 _And in a year, a year or so_  
_This will slip into the sea_  
_Well, it's been a long time, long time now  
_ _Since I've seen you smile_


	3. Sweet Mess

[ **III. Sweet Mess** ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyJvLa6vMOQ)

_Everything tonight_  
_Made everything alright_  
_I am speechless_  
_I listen to your words  
_ _Float like hummingbirds all around me_

-

It astounds you that you allowed yourself to be convinced that a gorilla costume was a good idea.

To be fair, it’s not like Pedro has to try very hard to get you to do what he wants, and also it’s not like you had any better plans. Still, the night is young, you’re looking for a scapegoat for this travesty of a costume, and you feel a small measure of satisfaction in blaming Pedro, no matter how unjustified.

Which, by the way, it _isn’t_.

Of course, the first thing he says when he opens the door and looks you over is, “I’m brilliant.”

“I hate you,” you say as you tug on the mask. “This thing is itchy and hot and I hate you.”

“Only in your dreams,” he says cheerfully, stepping aside to let you in. Oh, if only he knew.

“So how’s this Hero wooing thing going to happen? You going to get down on one knee and declare Claudio’s undying love for her?”

“No,” Pedro says. You follow him into the living room, appropriately decorated and blissfully empty. The party will not begin for another half hour. “Something much, much better.” He gestures toward his costume in the corner, walks over to it and opens its gleaming aluminum front to reveal a painted heart.

“Cute,” you say. “Though, uh, I don’t see how this plan is any better than Claudio actually telling her himself, y’know?”

Pedro clicks his tongue between his teeth. “You have a lot to learn, young padawan. It’s a brilliant plan. It’s a brilliant plan because I am brilliant and there are no flaws in it whatsoever.”

 “All right, Einstein,” you say, holding up your hands. “Can I plug up my music now?”

“Yeah! DJ Balth in the H-O-U-Z!”

“Never attempt a spelling bee, mate.”

“Hey, fuck you too.”

You enjoy the next few minutes of silence as you set up the music, plugging cords into walls and adjusting the volume on speakers. Soon, the two of you are joined by energetic guitar riffs and pulsing drum beats.

“Hey, I didn’t know you were into this band,” Pedro says, his voice colored with surprise. His foot taps on the floor, his knee bouncing up and down. You, in turn, didn’t know he was so into this song. But hey, you’ll take what you can get.

“I’m pretty sure if there was anyone who could be into everything that calls themselves a band, it’d be me,” you say. “Not to be cocky or anything, just dealin’ the truth.”

“Yeah,” Pedro says, nodding thoughtfully. “Yeah, I’d have to agree with you there.”

“Naturally,” you answer. “I’m always right.”

He responds by snorting very loudly, which you charitably ignore so that you can enjoy the cheese puffs in peace.

The party itself is mildly enjoyable, once people start filtering in. You got to pick the music, so no complaints there, and it’s all people you at least somewhat like, so no complaints there, either. If there’s one thing you know about high school parties, though, it’s that they have two universal constants.

Shitty snack food and shittier booze.

You lose track of Pedro in a haze of alcohol and costumed bodies. That’s fine; no one said you had to keep track of him. And there are other people to talk to, and meet, and other things to do. It’s easy to have fun in a place like this, even without your best friend looking over your shoulder.

You lose yourself to the music, and try not to think about how much beer you drink.

-

_He dragged you to your first high school party when you were in year eleven for the express purpose of getting drunk._

_To be fair, “high school” was probably the wrong way to describe it. He’d kept the façade running up until the moment he led you to the door of a place that was decidedly not the property of a student your age, and still had nothing to say when you shot him as doubtful a look as you could make it._

_“Er,” you said, peering at the blaringly neon sign above the door, “you said this was a high school party.”_

_“I didn’t lie,” he said defensively. “I said it would be a lot of high school kids, and plenty of kids our age come here every night.”_

_“Right. And how often have you been here?” you said, giving him a meaningful look._

_“That,” he said, “is not important right now.”_

_You sighed at him as pointedly as you could make it. “I don’t know, man. It’s not really my kind of crowd, y’know?”_

_“Yes, I'm perfectly aware that your kind of crowd is you facing a corner of the wall singing at yourself,” he said, taking ahold of your wrist and dragging you through the door. “We’re going to have fun tonight, Balthazar. I promise.”_

_You decided, out of the goodness of your heart, to humor him and not point out that the two of you had very different ideas of what fun is. Anyway, you got to spend the night with him, alone and away from your friends, so you reckoned it couldn’t be a horrible idea. After all, how bad could it be?_

_And then, of course, you entered the actual club and realized that things could get very,_ very _bad._

 _Not that there was anything inherently bad with writhing bodies and pulsing colors and music so loud and indistinct that you felt it more than heard it. But as soon as he plunged into the crowd with you, you felt yourself suffocating. You inhaled the sweat around you, you felt skin pressing against your skin to the beat of the music, you couldn’t even look at the ceiling because there was so many people around you and you could not_ breathe.

_It was then that you felt a squeeze around your wrist, and remembered that he was there._

_“What did we come here for, Balthazar?” he said. Screamed in your ear, really, but in his defense it was really the only way to overcome the throbbing bass._

_“To get smashed?” you yelled back._

_“Right! Bar’s back here!”_

_You didn’t know how long you spent at that table. You just knew it was enough to get you unsteady on your feet, unsteady with your brain sloshing about in your skull and your heartbeat in your fingertips. You licked your lips sluggishly; your tongue felt like molasses. The two of you had had alcohol before, but not like this._

_“Dance with me, Balthazar,” he said, and before you could say anything back he’d dragged you back into the throng of the crowd. You didn’t care anymore; it was all so much background noise. His face filled your vision to the brim; his face was the moon in your night sky._

_So this was what it was like to be drunk, really and truly properly drunk. This was what it felt like to feel nothing and everything all at once, to have the world spin below your feet but to be the stillest you’d ever been your whole life. This was what it was like._

_And this was what it was like to have his hands on your waist with his thumb just barely brushing at the bare skin of your back, his head almost too close to yours, to hungrily take all of him in and not have to worry about what he said or thought about you. To make sure you didn’t get lost in the crowd, part of you knew, but you didn’t care. You would take what you could get. You’d done it all your life._

_His lips were so close to your mouth. They looked so soft._

_“Who gave you the right to look so damned good?”_

_“What?” he yelled. The tuneless music pounded against the walls of your head._

_“I want to kiss you,” you said._

_“What?”_

_You didn’t know if he’d actually heard you or not. But as soon as the words left your mouth, you knew it was not a thing that should have been done. So instead of saying anything at all, before you would do something you would regret when the sun came out, you buried your head in his chest and your words in yours._

_And you clutched his elbows like you were clinging on to the edge of a cliff, and you felt the music vibrate the joints that held your bones together, and the minutes beat slowly past midnight._

-

Something like four or five hours into the party, you find yourself outside with nothing but a red solo cup in your right hand and the cool night air to keep you company.

You don’t really like how beer tastes going down your throat. You don’t like how overcast it makes your head feel, and you don’t like how slowly the world melts away when you get drunk. But you were always too polite to say no, and anyway, something is better than nobody at all. Even if it is the shittiest alcohol you’ve ever tasted.

Honestly, you’re not really cut out for parties, even small ones like this. People are okay, you suppose. But no matter how much you like them, they drain you. It's a guarantee. So you’ll dance and you’ll laugh and you’ll have fun, but the longer the hours stretch on the more the need to escape fills up your brain until you can’t stay anymore. It’s not anyone’s fault but your own. That doesn’t change the fact that you _need_ this. Or the fact that sometimes, when you're drunk enough, you hate yourself for it a little.

The moon hangs low in the sky tonight. It is round and large, bright enough to drown out the light of the stars. It looks as lonely as you feel.

The patio door slides open, and you sense more than hear his presence.

“Hey, Don Pedro,” you say, your eyes fixed on the moon.

“Hey, Balthazar.” You hear something drop onto the ground – his robot costume, maybe – and next thing you know, he’s sitting next to you on the stone step, his thigh two inches away from yours. You scarcely glance at him; you’re scared to, really, because without his costume on he’s wearing all black, foil clinging to his forearms, and you’re drunk enough to allow yourself to notice how good a color it is on him.

“So you got her, then?”

“It was a smashing success,” he says, crashing his fist into his open palm. With a small chuckle, he falls back onto his hands, looking contently upon the sky, and you know when he looks at the moon he sees something different than you. You hazard a peek at his upturned face, how the bleached light sets the shadows scattering across the sharp planes of it, and how even the whiteness can’t take away the flush of drunken happiness in his cheeks. You turn away; looking was a mistake, and you should have known.

The door remains partly open, and you can hear the warbled remnants of a song beyond its threshold. Soft and down-tempo, slow and sweet synths. You don’t remember putting this one on the playlist.

“Claudio’ll be glad, then.”

“He better,” Pedro says. “Haven’t seen him around lately, I think he left early, but I’ll tell him the good news as soon as I see him.”

“You’re really drunk right now,” you say, pointing out the obvious mostly because you don't know what else to say.

“Yup!” he says cheerfully with a wild laugh, falling onto his back and flinging his arms to either side of him. You can’t help it; you can’t look away from him anymore, so open and so blazingly happy like you never see him sober. Sober, you only see this side of him in rare, brief flashes of fortune. The thought makes a part of your guts twinge a little.

“Young love,” he sighs to the sky.

“Young love,” you say to him.

“I think I might be in young love.”

“Yeah?” You know, you know more than anything else in the world that what he’ll say next isn’t what you really want him to say, but your heart was never very good at listening to your head, and hope shines itself briefly on your insides like a weak ray of sunlight.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. She’s so goddamned beautiful.”

The sunlight shrivels up to dust. “Only the best, for Don Pedro.”

“Imma ask her out,” Pedro says decidedly. “Imma do it. You better believe it!”

“I believe you.” Pedro does what he wants. And never does what he doesn’t.

“Wanna know who she is?”

You hazard at honesty. “Not really.”

“Beatrice Duke,” he says. Apparently, he’s not paying attention to what you’re saying. He fades into silence. After a while, you realize he’s asleep. You would bet anything that it’ll be your job to wake him up and drag him into bed. You’re really looking forward to this task, clearly.

But it’s amazing, isn’t it? Just when you think your heart is in pieces so small he can’t possibly do any more damage to it, he finds new and better ways to break it all over again.

- 

 _You and I were set_  
_To float down with a map_  
_See where it takes us_  
_I left you on that street with shadow at your feet  
_ _I should've kissed you_


	4. I Sang Love Away

[ **IV. I Sang Love Away** ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb45IiicrVc)

_We scaled a ladder ascending to the roof  
While five years ago I leaped and no one knew_  
_Holding my guitar, I strummed a tune  
_ _I sang "I love you…"_

-

“So, uh, I saw the youtube video.”

Balthazar's voice sounds hesitant across the crackling phone line, hesitant but determined. That ought to be a virtue of his, right? Always concerned about everything but himself, and always quiet about it but always, always steadfast.

Sometimes, you think, it ought to be his downfall.

“This isn’t a conversation I want to have right now,” you say, aware of how petulant you sound but uncaring. “Or, ever. Really.” You know, because it’s not like you’ve spent the last hour sulking at your bedroom ceiling and avoiding general human contact or anything.

“Well, that’s too bad. We’re having it.”

You groan loudly. “Piss off.”

“Pedro, I just want to know that you’re okay. That’s all.”

But that’s part of the problem, isn’t it. He shouldn’t have to settle for _that’s all._ It’s such a stupid phrase. No one should have to settle for it.

It wouldn’t be fair to tell him that. You feel ashamed, sometimes, at all the things that you think to say to him that wouldn’t be fair. After all, you have a hard enough time being fair on yourself. But if there’s anyone you want to – have to – try to be fair to, it must be _him_.

“I’m… yeah. I’m good," you say, dragging your hand down your face. "It was stupid of me, anyway. I’m such a bloody idiot.”

“You can’t control how you feel about people, Pedro, and you can’t control how they feel about you.”

“Yeah, you’d know, wouldn’t you.”

 Silence.

Fuck. “God, I’m sorry,” you say, wincing at yourself. “I’m just – in a really foul mood, and I shouldn’t be taking it out on you, and just – I’m sorry.”

More silence. You feel your heart slowly sinking. Did you really fuck it up that bad? Is this the last straw? Are you never going to –

“It’s all right. You’ve said dumber things, I’m used to it by now.”

You let your breath out through your teeth. “Have I, really.”

“Want me to make you a list?”

“Nah, for some reason I think I’m good without that in my life,” you say. He laughs at that, soft and light like air, and you can almost see the smile on his face. It almost makes you want to smile too.

“Thanks, Balthazar,” you say quietly when the laughter dies away, quietly but as sincere as you can make it. Because really, it figures that even when you’re being the hugest dick to him, he still knows exactly what to say. “I feel loads better already. I mean it.”

“Always here for you, man,” he replies, and hangs up.

He has a way of saying the truth in the simplest way. It makes you want to feel guilty about needing him like this.

The week goes by, if not peacefully then certainly uneventfully. Claudio and Hero are together now, of course, but since they’re all happy now, and cutesy and couply and gross, you can’t exactly call that development exciting. The football team practices progress, but they’re nothing to write home about either. 

And nothing changes between you and Beatrice. She’s as loud and opinionated as ever, all the things that make her _her_. And part of you is grateful that she doesn’t want to make things weird, or a big deal. It really is. But another part of you, the smaller but the more vindictive one, wishes for evidence, a small hint, anything to show that your confession made some sort of impression on her, some effect in her life.

You feel wretched, wretched and spurned and _lonely_ , and maybe that’s why when the crazy stupid idea randomly took hold of you one morning in homeroom, you decided not to let it go. After all, you promised her you’d set her up with someone, didn’t you? And Pedro Donaldson, all around great guy, never goes back on his promises.

When you bring it up with your friends, slowly and one by one, to your mild surprise they all seem enthusiastic toward the prospect. If they said no, you might have nipped it in the bud, but there’s no going back now that you have accomplices. And none of your friends seem to think that it’s a bad idea, so maybe you’re on to something here.

And who knows? Maybe Bea and Ben  _will_ end up liking each other. Maybe they’ll end up happy together.

That’s why you’re doing this, you say to yourself. That’s the only reason why.

Balthazar ends up being the last person you tell, and predictably his reaction is different from everyone else’s. Rather than hysterical laughter or enthusiastic exclamations of approval, he merely looks at you in silence.

“You sure you okay, Pedro?” he says finally.

You feel your face scrunch up with mild annoyance. “Yeah, I’m fine. Look, you don’t have to keep asking me that. Anyway, just tell me if you want in or not.”

He runs a hand through his hair. “Yeah, why not. I reckon they’d look pretty sweet next to each other, if they ever stopped snapping at each other’s throats every two seconds.” You’re over Beatrice Duke. Your heart is not squeezing at those words because you are over her. “But – I dunno if I believe you.”

You sigh. “Believe me about what? That I don’t think this is the best plan I’ve ever come up with? I’m brilliant, remember?”

“No,” he says. “I dunno if I believe you’re doing this because you want her to be happy.”

You roll your eyes. “She’s my _friend_ , Balthazar.”

“All right, all right,” he says, holding up his hands placatingly. “If you say so, Don Pedro.”

“Stop calling me that!”

The plan goes off without a hitch. And the longer it drags on, the less you notice your secret angsty heart until, one day, you realize you really are over Beatrice Duke. And to think, all it took was a convoluted plan to set up your token hotheaded loudmouth friends. That is, frankly to your surprise, actually _working_.

If you're going to be honest with yourself, it was never going to have worked out between you and her. It takes a special kind of pair that can begin in senior year and have any hopes of continuing after that, people who know each other well enough not to let miles of distance fester their connection, and you and her? Well, you probably wouldn't have even lasted two days. You can't remember the last time you went out with someone and made it that long.

So maybe it's for the best this happened. Maybe you're not cut out for high school relationships. You'd probably be hard-pressed to find someone who could put up with your bullshit this late in the year. And anyway, the single life isn't so bad, right?

Right.

One day, you receive a text from Balthazar that says:

 _2:03PM_  
_From: GOD JONES  
_ _Got a new song I wanna show you, you game?_

_2:05PM_  
_To: GOD JONES  
_ _HELL YEAH I’M GAME_

_2:06PM_  
_To: GOD JONES  
_ _… Can I get Ursula to film it? Plsthx_

You pull into his driveway about half an hour later. You’re pretty eager about this, to be honest. He’s constantly beating rhythms into his surroundings and humming stray melodies under his breath, but it’s actually a bit rare for him to play you a song of his own volition. You achieve mild to moderate success at getting him to play for you, but usually only after much coaxing. The fact that he’s actually invited you to hear something he’s written is pretty unprecedented.

In his bedroom, he has a keyboard set up, and he’s playing chords on it absent-mindedly when you come in. Ursula is there too, intently focused on setting up her camera.

“Hey, Ursula,” you say, throwing your weight down on the couch. “Thanks for coming on such short notice. I’m pretty terrible at filming…”

“No need to tell me,” she says, cutting you short. “What, did you use your phone last time?”

“What’s so bad about using my phone?” You can't help but feel offended at what sounds suspiciously like an accusation.

She gawks at you. “It’s just wrong,” she says after a pause that felt almost shocked, like she’s stating the absolute obvious. “The angle was horrendous. And what was with that shake? An amoeba could have done a better job.”

“Ouch," you say dryly.

“I will not apologize for telling the truth.” Ursula punctuates the statement by sticking her tongue out at you. You suppose you deserve it.

The three of you settle in silence punctuated by Balthazar’s chords. He does not look at you, you notice, or speak at all. You wonder what could possibly be on his mind.

Finally, Ursula asks him if he’s ready. He slowly nods, and looks up at you with the faintest of smiles.

“So, Pedro,” he says, his fingers still running over the keyboard carelessly, and if you look closely you can almost see a nervous tremble in his hands, “you were pretty down a while back, and I’ve been working on this number for a while but I decided to finish up this thing to try to cheer you up a bit. I don’t suppose you need it now, but I wasn’t done with it when you did, and, well… it seemed a shame to let it go to waste. So. Yeah. An ode to you, Pedro.”

You realize, then, that you have no idea what to expect.

He puts his fingers to the keys and begins to sing.

-

_It was three in the morning when your phone buzzed loudly enough to awake you._

_You almost turned over and ignored it, but you realized the name on the screen was not one you could pass by. And so without hesitation you grabbed the phone and picked up the call._

_“Balthazar.”_

_There was nothing over the line except for heavy, irregular breathing._

_“Balthazar…” You sat up straight in bed, fully awake. “Balthazar, are you crying?”_

_Silence. And then a hitched sigh._

_“What the hell is wrong?”_

_“I… could you come over?”_

_“Sure. Yeah,” you said, throwing the covers off and blindly groping in the dark for what you hoped was a clean pair of jeans. “What do you need?”_

_“I just… need to get out.”_

_“Of where?”_

_Silence._

_“Balthazar.”_

_“I don’t care where we go. Just. Not here.”_

_In a way, it was good that he’d woken you up so late, because all the roads were clear. You got to his house in less than ten minutes._ _He was sitting on his front step. His hair was ruffled, and he was still in the oversized sweatpants and T-shirt he used for PJ’s, but other than that there were no signs that he had been even a little bit distraught over the phone just a few minutes prior. No red eyes, no sniffling, no anything._

_“You should go home,” he said when you approached. “I… didn’t mean to call you. It was a selfish thing to do.”_

_“Bullshit,” you said. “Come on. I know just where to take you.”_

_He snorted, but got into the car anyway. “I don’t suppose I’m allowed to ask where that would be.”_

_“Yeah,” you said, closing the door behind him. “You suppose correctly.”_

_When you drove at night, you couldn't really pay much attention to anything else, let alone check on how he was doing, but you noticed that he turned away from you resolutely, his chin resting on his elbow. The window was half down, and the wind blew through his unkempt hair. You almost wished you could see his face._

_“Wait,” he said when you pulled to a stop. “Are we at Messina?”_

_“Yup,” you answered, flashing him a brief grin before getting out the car._

_He shook his head as he followed you. “Why? The term hasn't even started yet.”_

_“Ye of little faith. Just come on, and you’ll see why.”_

_You hadn’t gone where you were planning to take him in a while, but you trusted that the people at Messina wouldn’t lock the doors that you needed. And you were right; that abandoned stairwell you once frequented was right where you remembered it._

_“This whole situation is getting more and more worrisome,” he said as you began the climb._

_“Shhh. Don’t question it.”_

_At last, you arrived at the top of the staircase, pushed open the door, and breathed in the night air._

_“Wow.”_

_You stayed silent, walking across the roof to its edge and taking your seat. You’d been here, on top of the tallest building at school, many times in the past. It had always been something you wanted to keep to yourself, one of Messina’s best kept secrets. But, you figured, desperate times called for desperate measures._

_“Aren’t you afraid you’re going to die?”_

_“Not at all, I’ve been here loads.” You turned back to him, where he was still standing in the stairwell, and gestured to the spot next to you. “Come on, loser. This edge is calling your name.”_

_“What if I fall?” He was already walking toward you._

_“I’ll catch you.”_

_“Somehow, I doubt that’ll work out well for either of us.” Carefully, he sat down, crossing his legs while yours dangled freely over the edge._

_“Why do you always want to shit on my dreams?”_

_“Your dreams are very important to me,” he said softly. It was supposed to come across as sarcastic, you knew, but there was a wistfulness that softened the dryness out of his words. You didn’t waste your time worrying about it, though. You wouldn’t get an explanation even if you asked._

_“Do you like it?”_

_“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it’s incredible. We’re so high up. How’d you find this place?”_

_“Well…” you sighed. “People can be too much sometimes, you know? And I never had anything to clear my head like you have your music. So I found this place. And… I dunno. There’s a – sort of peace, in looking down over the edge of a roof and seeing how small everything is. How small our lives are, compared to the rest of the world.”_

_He let out a small laugh. “But up here, it’s never felt so big.”_

_You looked to him in surprise. “Yeah?”_

_“Yeah.”_

_You hummed thoughtfully. “That’s good, yeah?”_

_To be frank, you weren't sure what exactly he meant. But the tension was already leaving his shoulders, and it made you happy to see him feel better, so you didn't mind his ambiguity. Honestly, he'd done so much for you in the last few years, in small and quiet ways; it seemed only right that you repaid the favor._

_“You’re right,” he said._

_“I’m always right,” you answered, tossing your head._

_He smiled. “I feel at peace now.”_

_He rested his head on your shoulder, then, and you sat there until the morning came._

-

“Uh,” Ursula says when the song is done, “I have to go… now… See you guys at school tomorrow.”

When she is gone, there is only you and Balthazar and silence that echoes throughout the room.

He smiles faintly at his open palms, but you can’t look away from him. You can’t really move, either, or think, really. You can only stare.

“Balthazar…”

“Sorry.”

You pause. “What?”

He shakes his head and lets out an exhaled chuckle. “Sorry. This was, uh… this was really self-indulgent of me.”

“Balthazar.”

“You can go now,” he says softly. “If you want.” He won’t look up, won’t look at anywhere but his callused fingertips. You recognize the set of his mouth and the tiny crease between his brows. And you know very well why he doesn’t want you around right now.

What you wouldn’t give to give him what he needs, you think. If only you knew what that was.

But you’re only capable of giving him what he wants, so without another word, you get up and leave the house and climb into your car and sit there.

The thing is, you’ve known Balthazar for a long time now, and that means you know that, despite his propensity for silence, he is an open book, if you’re patient enough to learn his language.

You know the shape of his words well enough to know he means everything that he says.

So what _does_ he mean?

-

_“But I have to cut you loose”_


	5. Face to Face

[ **V. Face to Face** ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQqD40jRGJo)

_And I got reasons to hide_  
_I got feelings to show_  
_I know this much, there’s still lots to learn  
_ _To learn to let go_

- 

A few days’ time proves that you are just as much of an idiot as Pedro is oblivious. He doesn’t say anything about the song, and the one time you mention it he smiles, claps his hand on your shoulder, and praises you on how clever and witty you are.

You’re not sure what response you were expecting or wanting, but it certainly wasn’t that.

And nothing changes. It’s as simple as that. He picks you up every morning and drives you back home every afternoon. You text him with an observation of the day you think he might appreciate, or a joke you wouldn’t think to tell anyone else. Life goes on. You gave your heart to Pedro Donaldson in as explicit terms as you could make it, and life just goes on.

It’s not like you expected the song to make him drop everything and run into your arms. Far from it. But at the least, you hoped to have some sense of – of _something_. Something concrete. It didn’t really matter what it was, exactly; you hoped for it anyway. Instead, all you get is unspoken words, unresolved tension that settles in the small of your back and speeds up your breathing every time you think about it. Which is fine. Okay, that’s perfectly fine. You would wait for Pedro until the end of the world and beyond. You’ve waited for him all this time.

But not when you could feel, in the bottom of your heart and at the base of your spine, that you were waiting on nothing.

“I don’t get it,” you say to Ursula one day, leaning forward across the small table in the coffee shop she’s taken you to. She’d lured you away from fooling around on your guitar with a request to go over some notes for class and the promise of coffee, which is honestly probably the best way to do it. You’ll never say no to coffee. “Shouldn’t he have said something by now?”

“What do you mean?” she says, taking a long sip from her cup as she scribbles across her notes. Unlike you, she’s actually trying – and succeeding – at being productive. Go figure. "Are you talking about the song you sang to Pedro?"

“Well…” You exhale. Your feelings have never been a secret to Ursula, but it still sets your heart racing to talk about it out loud. “You heard it, didn’t you? You’d think he’d – I dunno. Respond, maybe. In a way other than to laugh.”

“What did you hope to accomplish?” Ursula says, peering at you above her round-rimmed glasses with curiosity.

“I just wanted to say _something_ for once,” you say, tapping your fingers to the soft coffee shop music agitatedly. You barely pay attention to the lyrics; they make you nervous anyway. “He’s said some pretty stupid things to me, you know. And I don’t want to let him walk all over my feelings when he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. But I’d think it was pretty obvious.”

“Not really, actually.”

You pause. “Yeah?”

“Not for Pedro, I’d imagine,” she says, chewing on her lip. “He’s not exactly the most observant, is he?”

“Yeah, I know,” you say. You feel vaguely defeated.

“You know, for what it’s worth, it didn’t seem like a love confession or anything to me.”

You look to her in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“Well…” She hesitates, as if what she’s about to say is crossing a line. “It seemed like you were giving him your blessing.”

“My blessing?”

“Like you were letting him go.”

She drops the subject then, looking down to her notes with her hair falling into her face, and you have no choice but to do the same.

But you can’t really drop the subject yourself, not in your mind. When you go to bed that night, when you lay on your back and let the blazing image of him prevent you from falling asleep, her words float back into your thoughts. Because it really did seem like it, didn’t it? Like you were saying he’d be good with anyone else but you? And, really, who’s to say that’s not why you wrote the damned thing? Because, and you’ve got to be honest with yourself, moving on would take all the pain away, wouldn’t it?

Letting him go. Maybe there’s something to that.

Not that it works. You go to sleep and you wake up thinking about him. The first and last person you talk to in the day is him. When you pick up your guitar, you find yourself absently picking the chords to “Sigh No More”. His voice is the song that’s always stuck in your head. You have it just as bad as you ever did. Maybe even worse.

Though whenever you see him now, he seems rather agitated, preoccupied. You ask him, sometimes, if he’s okay, but all he ever responds with is an absent shake of his head and a muttered, “Yeah, I’m fine.” Clearly, something’s bothering him. But if he’s not telling you, it’s probably not a problem of his. After all, he respects the integrity of other people’s secrets rather well.

You imagine Ursula can’t be the only one among your friends who knows about your own. You’re not exactly a subtle person, and though you reckon people might think that you are, your friends aren’t idiots who don’t know you at all. You wonder what they must think of you.

But in the end, it doesn’t matter; nothing that they think would change a thing.

In any case, it’s not like you have that much opportunity to ask, even if you were curious. Beatrice and the other girls are busy preparing for Hero’s sixteenth birthday party. The boys seem just as preoccupied as Pedro – some even more so. You can’t help but feel somewhat left out. Though you don’t mind. If anyone needs you, all they have to do is ask.

That’s what you remind yourself as you get dressed for Hero’s party. And as Pedro picks you up in his old, rusted truck. You don’t talk to him, though the silence is still comfortable, and you – perhaps foolishly – refuse to look at him. But you still feel the need to ask what's on his mind.

When you get to Hero’s house, he glances at you, as if on the verge of saying something. You decide to beat him to the punch.

“Don’t tell me you’re fine, because you’re obviously not,” you say, staring straight ahead. “Something’s up, and you won’t tell me about it.”

You hear the sound of skin against leather. You don’t have to look to know he’s squeezing the steering wheel. “It’s not your business, Balthazar. Quite frankly, it’s not really mine, either.”

“I know,” you say quietly. “I’m not expecting you to say anything. When have I ever expected you to tell me something you don’t want to? I just wanna know that things are okay.”

“Yeah,” he says, a hint of shadows coloring the edge of his voice. “For me, anyway.”

You don’t like it when he sounds so dark. “Can you believe Hero’s turning 16?” you say. “When you were 16, the first thing you did was run through your street naked.”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “Let’s hope I didn’t start a trend.”

“Looks like I’m not the trendy one.”

He snorts. “For once in your life, right?”

“That’s me. I’m just the trendiest there is.”

“Really now,” he says, and that’s when he finally breaks character and laughs. You can’t help but feel relieved. Crisis averted, for now.

The two of you leave the car and make your way to the house. Hero greets the two of you with a smile on her face, glowing. She’s lovely in a dress that clings to her in all the right ways and boots that come up to her knees. You get the sense that she could put on a trash bag with holes for a head and arms and still be just as radiant.

The tension doesn’t leave Pedro’s shoulders, even as he enters the house and slips off his shoes. At the least, though, he’s smiling in a way that only you couldn’t be fooled by. You suppose, for the moment, that’s really the most you can ask for.

In the meantime, you allow yourself to enjoy the moment. It’s somewhat rare to see everyone gathered here, like this. You’re more likely to encounter them in pairs, in groups, not all at once. It’s nice, you think, as you weave through the crowds and catch bits of conversation that don’t make sense. You’re not great at small talk, but no one seems to expect it of you, and you feel content to drift. 

Pedro, you notice, hovers near Claudio at the peripheral. You can’t tell what they whisper to each other, but the expressions on their faces certainly don’t match the mood of the occasion. You can only guess what they’re up to, but you begin to suspect Pedro’s earlier tension must stem from whatever it is. John, too, seems to separate himself from the rest of the room. Not that that’s atypical. But it unnerves you a bit, that he’s smiling so openly when talking to no one at all.

Regardless, you’re glad that everyone else is having a good time. It’s nice to see them together.

For the last time, most likely.

The sudden thought hits you like a punch in the gut. Because the end is coming near, isn’t it? In just a few months, you’re leaving Messina, and you might never see some of these people again. Let alone in the same room.

And, after all, what’s to say you’ll see _him_ again, after you graduate?

The thought overwhelms you, drowns you in dread. You look at him, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, and you can’t stop the lump from forming in your throat. It would be for the best, wouldn’t it, if he left your life forever, along with all the what-if’s and blurred lines and _nothing_?

Would it?

You can’t think, you can’t feel; the only thing you can do, really, is escape.

So that’s what you do.

-

_The first time you walked into his house for a sleepover, you could tell he wanted to talk to you about something._

_It only took a few months of knowing him for him to invite you over. And yet, this was the first time you’ve ever been close enough to someone to have them ask you to sleep in their room. Every time you remembered it you could feel a spark of happiness ignite in your gut._ _And so there you were, seeing his house for the first time, being in such close proximity with him for the first time, and there was no one else, and he wanted to tell you something. It was all very new and exciting and a little scary._

_But of course he wasn’t going to say anything at the beginning. His parents were gone for the night, and so was his brother at someone else’s house, and you were the only people in there. You played video games, mostly because he wanted to, though you did manage to snag a round or two of Mario Kart for yourself. You ate his shitty snack food and, when he excitedly pulled out two cans from the depths of his refrigerator, drank his shittier booze. In those days, you didn’t care what you did, would have gladly deferred to his desires until the end of time._

_An hour past midnight, the two of you were lying on his couch, blankets tangled around your legs, paralyzed with laughter at nothing in particular. He’d suggested putting on a movie, but neither of you were inclined to move, at the moment._

_All of a sudden, his laughter stopped. Bewildered, you stopped too, and the room fell into silence._

_Somehow, his head had ended up in your lap. Your head was too foggy to remember how it got there._

_“I have something to tell you,” he said finally. You remembered vaguely that you knew this._

_“Do you really?”_

_“Yeah, isn’t this what sleepovers are for? Telling secrets?”_

_“You don’t have to wait until a sleepover to tell me secrets.”_

_“I know. But this adds to the atmosphere, doesn’t it?” He giggled at his own childishness._

_“You’re silly,” you told him. “Silly. Ridiculous. Dumb. You are a dummy.”_

_“Fight me,” he said, still laughing. But like before, he settled into quiet. You got the sense that he might be afraid. Though what he was afraid of, you couldn’t fathom._

_“You’re scared to tell me, aren’t you?”_

_“Am not!” he said defensively. Oddly enough, this did not help his case._

_“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.” You didn’t want to be the kind of person to force him into something he didn’t want. You didn’t ever want that. He deserved better than that._

_“I do,” he sighed. “I really do. It’s just. Weird to say out loud.”_

_You waited. Waited for him to gather his courage, waited for him to speak, waited for him to let go of his burden. Even then, you knew you would have waited for him, for anything. And so you did. And, falteringly, he opened his mouth, and spoke the words._

_“You know, I really, really like girls and all, but… I think… I know this, but, uh… I’m bisexual.”_

_His eyes met yours; they were wide with nervousness, desperation for approval. You didn’t know why he would have to worry about your approval. Didn’t he know that he always had it? And, anyway, you’d already told him, almost from the day you met, that you liked boys. You were the last person who would reject him._

_For more reasons than one._

_You realized, then, that your heart was beating so hard you felt it against your ribcage._

_His head was still in your lap._

_“All around great guy, eh?” you said, and you couldn’t help it; your face broke into a grin._ _Your statement surprised a laugh out of him, and you were glad for it._

_“So you’re okay with it?”_

_You rolled your eyes, pushing his head lightly with the palm of your hand in chastisement. “Don’t be an idiot.”_

_His air escaped between his lips in a hiss. “Right.”_

_You smiled at him, as reassuringly as you could make it. “Are you planning on telling anyone else?”_

_“Pfffff.” He laughed again, this time derisively, and ran hands agitatedly through his hair. “It’s not something about me people have to know, you know? I mean to say… it’s not all that important to who I am as a person. I suppose if someone asks, I won’t lie, but I just… don’t really feel the need to go out of way to say something. It doesn’t define me.”_

_But it’s still a part of who you are, you thought. “Whatever you’re comfortable with,” you said out loud._

_He smiled back, at that. A genuine smile. One you rarely got to see. It warmed your heart._

_“Okay,” he said. “Your turn.”_

_You raised your eyebrows. “My turn?”_

_“Sleepovers are for secrets. So tell me one. And don’t lie. You’re not allowed to lie.”_

_And you could have told him. You could have exposed the inside of your chest to him, shown him a sight you hadn’t shown anyone before. You could have released the words that filled your head and your dreams, like freeing caged birds. You could have flown._

_Or you could have fallen._

_“I don’t have any secrets worth telling,” you said._

_You didn’t lie._

-

He finds you alone in the living room. It figures, of course, that despite the dozens of people that clutter Hero’s dining room right now, he would be the one to notice you were missing. Just your luck, right?

You tense up as he approaches, mostly because you remember what happened the last time you two were alone at a party, though it doesn’t take you long to realize he’s perfectly sober tonight. But god, you’re an idiot for thinking it was a remotely good idea to look at him, because now that you have, you can’t really take your eyes off of him. You’d stopped yourself from focusing on him too much before, but there’s nothing to distract you now, nothing to distract you from the casual grace of his rolled up sleeves, how comfortable he looks in nice clothes and bare feet. Your heart squeezes, despite yourself. You know better. And yet you don’t.

“I see now,” he says as he takes his seat by you. His leg is an inch from yours. “A blank wall really is more interesting than a party full of people we know and love.”

“Ah, don’t be an ass,” you say, knocking your shoulder into his.

“Such things are out of my control.”

“Yeah,” you say thoughtfully. “I s’ppose if one were to be, say, inherently an ass, it would probably be impossible for one to rid oneself of said quality. Y’know, on the account of being inherently an ass.”

He snorts. “Flawless logic!”

“I am the mighty Balthazar,” you say, “and I _am_ flawless.”

He bursts out laughing at that, silent laughter that whispers from his lips and trembles through the set of his shoulders like an earthquake. You are helpless against the sound of it, helpless to do anything but love him with every part of you, and let yourself do it.

You’ve never allowed yourself to be this unrestrained, you realize, and the onslaught of it makes you weak in the knees, though you’re sitting down. Because what is the point of it? What is the point of denying yourself the pleasure, the honor of this? So you won’t get hurt? So he won’t leave you? You couldn’t let him go if you tried. And you have. But there are worse things in life, you know, than loving your best friend, and one day maybe, you’ll be proud enough to stand on top of a mountain and tell the world that at one point in your life, you loved a boy named Pedro Donaldson with as much as you could give him.

And it was enough. It was always enough.

So to hell with it. To hell with being afraid, and to hell with pretending to be selfless, and to hell with letting him go because you are physically incapable of committing such a sin. To hell with hiding yourself from him, because you’re tired of pining and silent hope and stupid songs you write in your dreams. It was always the most selfish thing to do, anyway.

 “Yeah, so, uh, I have something to tell you.”

“Yeah?” You can feel him look to you in surprise.

To hell with it all.

“This is probably the wrong place and time to tell you this. But, you know. No time like the present, am I right?” You take a deep breath. You can feel your hands shaking. You’ve played this scene out in your head hundreds upon thousands of times, movies that screened on the backs of your eyelids to serenade you to sleep, but still you feel so scared to say the words out loud.

“Tell me what?” Don’t have to look at him to know his eyebrows are furrowed in confusion. You know him too damned well. 

“That song that I played you…” No, that’s the wrong way to start. Your heart is beating too fast for this shit.

“Yeah?” he says slowly, uncomprehendingly. Part of you wishes with a fierce desperation that he could stay like that forever. The other part wants him to understand what you mean for once, just once in your life, so that you don’t have to say it yourself. But you know he never will.

“Well, you know that love happens to the best and the worst of us, yeah?”

He shakes his head. “Where are you going with this?”

“Just – just hear me out,” you say. You can feel the sweat on the back of your neck. “Love happens to the best and the worst of us. And sometimes, it can be messy, and breathtaking and spectacular, and you don’t fall into it so much as you collide into the other person. And there’s fireworks and heat and ups and downs. And it’s beautiful. It’s really beautiful.”

There’s rarely been a time in your life when you said this many words at once, and this fast, but honestly, these are the words you’ve kept in your heart for years, and if you’re going to have one big speech in your life, this ought to be it.

“And…” You squeeze your hand into a fist on your knee. “Sometimes it happens real casual like, you know? Sometimes it happens slowly and quietly, so slowly and so quietly that you don’t even know it’s happened until you’re right in the middle of it.”

“Balthazar…”

“But just because it’s sneaked up on you,” you say, the words passing your lips with increasing urgency, “doesn’t mean that it means any less.”

You turn to him, then, your everything shaking, and the way he’s looking at you makes you pause. He’s confused, probably more confused than you’ve ever seen him be, but he’s on the edge of epiphany. And for a heartstopping moment, you almost pull back, almost stop talking, because how the hell are you supposed to know what it’ll be like once you’ve pushed him off of it?

But, then again, you’ve said too much already, and you owe yourself this, now. You owe yourself this as much as you owe it to him.

“Pedro, I’m…”

You’re –

So –

“Hey, guys?” The door swings open with a crash that resounds through your core. It’s Beatrice, her hair tucked neatly behind her ears and her sleeves resplendent about her elbows, sticking her head into the room. “Sorry to interrupt, but it’s time for cake.”

“Be right there,” Pedro says, his eyes still on you. As soon as she leaves, the room is left in silence.

“Balthazar?”

His stare burns into your skull, it sears your brain, and this is not something you can do anymore. Just like every other damned time in your life, all the mindless courage that propelled you before has dissipated, and you feel a bit like a deflated balloon.

“Never mind,” you say, shaking your head. You stand up. Your words sink down to your toes. “We’ll talk after, yeah?”

You don’t wait for an answer.

-

 _And I can see it in your face_  
_Can’t you taste it on your tongue?_  
_Can someone please tell me  
_ _Where it’s coming from?_


	6. Wounds to Lick in Life

[ **VI. Wounds to Lick in Life** ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlcSh0bCYoc)

_Oh you lie next to me_  
_Heart is beating heavily_  
_There's blood in your ear though  
_ _Blood on your shirt_

-

You don’t talk after.

Certainly, you wanted to blame him for it the first few days because you thought he’d taken sides – the wrong side – but after you had some time to cool down, you figured Balthazar was too reasonable of a person to do something like that. Knowing the bastard, he just wanted to be there for everyone involved.

Of course, that means that you’re the childish one here, but you can’t really bring yourself to care.

And anyway, no matter how you look at it, you can’t see yourself as in the wrong. What Hero did to Claudio – it’s not like you expected that of her, no one expects something like that of anyone, but you can’t deny the obvious just because you somewhat like the person. You can’t not be fair.

Beatrice and Ben won’t listen to you, obviously. You don’t need them to, or anyone else, really. What matters is that Claudio is out of a bad situation, and you feel obligated to support him along the way, since no one else will. All that needed to happen has happened.

So why do you still feel so damned unsatisfied?

Things are happening too fast, you decide. You can’t make sense of any of it. Your feelings and your thoughts about it all blur together in a haze that takes your mind by storm, a perpetual whirlwind you can’t escape. There is no hope of deciphering any of it. You don’t even bother trying.

You’re so distracted that almost two weeks pass by before you realize you haven’t said much of anything to Balthazar. You text each other, he hitches rides from you, and he’s not hostile – that’s not ever been his style – but the silence between you now is no longer a familiar friend. Though he still smiles and though he still taps his foot to the radio there’s a tension to it, the silence. You can’t work it out, no matter how long you poke and prod at it in your head to figure out why it’s there.

It was always easier for you to tell that something was on Balthazar’s mind than for you to figure out what it was. So you don’t push it. You figure that’s probably for the best.

Of course, this leads to the result that the only person in the group who will actually legitimately talk to you is Claudio. And it’s fine, that’s fine; Claudio’s a fine guy to talk to. He is.

“I can’t believe this,” he says for what’s probably the fiftieth time since this whole shitstorm went down. You’re sitting in your basement playing video games. As mentioned, Claudio is the only one who wants to play video games with you right now.

“Yes, I know,” you say dryly. “Your girlfriend stabbed you in the back and none of our friends will talk to us now. We’ve been over this before.”

“You’d think at least someone would, I dunno, show sympathy,” he continues, apparently ignoring you entirely. “You know it was her, you know it as well as I do. But no one else is treating me that way.”

You sigh through your nose. You’ve heard this already, many times. You enthusiastically went along with him the first few times, but the more he wanted to talk about it the less you did. You wonder what will happen this time, if you don’t respond.

To your surprise, he says nothing for a long while, lets the silence stretch out into minutes. The only sounds in the room come from the TV, low-volume blows and hits as you attempt to kill him as many times as possible, tinny cartoon screams when one of you gets pushed off the ledge.

“How could she do this to me?” he says, finally. He sounds small, like he’s shrunk in on himself.

After a quick evaluation of priorities, you make the executive decision to pause the game of Smash Bros. He looks to you in surprise as you put your control down. “Look, it’s a fucked up situation for sure,” you say. “But we can get past it. I’m sure time will help you move on.”

“There’s no moving on,” he says bitterly. “Not from this.”

“Well…” You chew the inside of your cheek. “Is that exactly her fault?”

He snaps his head toward you. “Pedro? Are you shitting me?”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” you say quickly, holding up your hands. “But – honestly, man, you know I’m a hundred percent with you – maybe if you’d talked to her in private – “

He says nothing to that, but you can see the sudden blaze of fury in his eyes before he gets up and leaves the room.

Well. He’s a fine person to talk to, most of the time. But he’s no Balthazar.

It occurs to you, then, sitting alone in the basement with only tense-sounding music playing from the abandoned video game to fill the silence, how much you miss him. He doesn’t text you all that much anymore, barely even looks at you in the car. And he smiles when he’s around you, but it’s not the same because he’s just not around you nearly as much as he used to be. Funny how you never realized how dependent you were on his quiet truths and sunlight smiles until you didn’t have them anymore.

“Is Balthazar mad at me, do you think?” you ask Ursula during lunch one day. She’s more neutral than some of the others, though you can tell that she’s leaning away from you a little at the present moment. You just manage to refrain from rolling your eyes. “And don’t worry, I only want to bother you for a few minutes.”

She gives you a look. You’re not really sure what it means.

“Mad at you?” she says. “Why would you think that?”

“Er, I dunno… we just – haven’t talked, in a few days. Yeah.”

“I don’t know, Pedro,” she says. “Balthazar, mad at you. Is he even physically capable of being mad? At anyone?”

“Shit, I dunno,” you say. You for some reason feel obligated to go on the defensive, though you know you’re probably just overreacting. “It’s just that things have been happening so fast. It’s hard to know anything about anyone. And at the least – well, I’d really hate it if he were upset.”

She chews on her words with a measure of hesitancy. “Look,” she says finally, falteringly. “If you think you guys have issues, maybe I’m not the person to ask. Maybe you should talk to him yourself.”

“He’s not talking to me, though!” you burst out, suddenly irritated.

“Pedro…” She begins, but once again, she hesitates.

“Why do you think he’s not talking to me?”

“Well, maybe…” You can see her struggling to find the right thing to say. “Maybe he thinks you’re the one avoiding him.”

“What?” Your frustration dissipates in the face of bewilderment. “Why the hell would he think that?”

The expression Ursula’s face seems rather conflicted. “Just think about it.” And she picks up her stuff to leave.

You sit there with nothing to keep you company but your thoughts, and at first you’re angry. You’re angry at the accusation that the weird thing that’s come between you and Balthazar is somehow your fault. You’re angry that no one will tell you what to do or feel outright, just dances around the issue with so much fucking grace. And most of all, you’re angry that you feel like you _can’t_ talk to him about it.

But the idea that he thinks _you’re_ avoiding him is just ridiculous, isn’t it? What could you possibly have done to make him think something so idiotic?

_Just because it’s sneaked up on you doesn’t mean that it means any less._

The enigmatic words rise unbidden to the forefront of your mind, but once they’re there you can’t get rid of them. You’ve been so preoccupied with everything that’s happened in the past few weeks that you haven’t had time to even attempt to figure out what he wanted to tell you before you went to get cake and everything went to shit.

You remember the way he left the room with his hands in his pockets, quickly and with regret. Regret about what he said?

Is that why he thinks you don’t want to talk to him?

But how could you be mad at him if you don’t even know what he means?

But, then again, how could _he_ know that?

With some discomfort, you realize perhaps he isn’t entirely to blame for the lack of communication.

“Gah,” you say, and press your face into your hands.

-

_The day before Year 13 started, you drove to Balthazar’s favorite coffee shop with him because he loves coffee, and you love to drive to places with him. Honestly, at that point, the two of you didn’t really need much of a reason to do things together. You’re not much for coffee, yourself, but you like to treat yourself on occasion, and this was a good enough reason to do so. Within minutes of getting there, you’d placed your orders and were sitting across from each other at your usual table by the window._

_“Amazing, isn’t it,” you said, contemplating the cup in front of you._

_What?”_

_“I could be on an actual date right now. I could be finding love! And instead, I’m here with you.”_

_He laughed. “Don’t flatter yourself, man. And don’t pretend you don’t love every second of it.”_

_“Eh,” you said, shrugging. “You’re okay.”_

_“Hey, now,” he said. “Watch yourself.”_

_“But it’s something to think about, isn’t it?” You held the cup in your hand, letting the warmth seep into the cracks of your palm. “Love. Romance. The only people in the group right now who’ve got that are Meg and Robbie. Everyone else… Well, we still have a year to find out what’s going to happen, yeah?”_

_He didn’t stop smiling, exactly, but he definitely wasn’t grinning at your words._

_“Y’know, I don’t really see a point in trying to go out with someone your senior year,” he said._

_“Why?” You couldn’t help but be surprised. After all, he always struck you as a bit of a romantic._

_“I guess I just don’t want a relationship with a deadline.” He looked out the window, then, chin resting on his hand, and there was such a quality of melancholy to his smile that it made you want to slap him. He shouldn’t have to feel that way, so young._

_“Jesus,” you said. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a cynic.”_

_He didn’t reply, just tapped his fingers absently on the surface of the table to the beat of the music playing softly on hidden speakers._

_“You know, now that I think about it, you haven’t had a relationship for a while, have you? Since… Well, since at least before Year 12 started.”_

_The start of Year 12. That wasn’t such a good thing to bring up in conversation right then, and you realized it as soon as you said it. But it was too late._

_“And what is that supposed to mean?” he said mildly._

_“I dunno,” you answered, shifting in your seat. “Just… can’t help wonder the reason for that. Is all.”_

_“And does there have to be a reason?” He turned his gaze away from the window to look at you pointedly. If you didn’t know him better, you would have taken it for a challenge._

_You shrugged. “It’s not like you have a lack of opportunity. You’ve got so many girls after you, it’s ridiculous.”_

_The smile, the smile that was always dancing on the corners of his mouth, dropped from his face._

_“So basically,” he said slowly, “if I was straight, I’d be in a relationship, and I’d be so much happier than I am right now, is that right?”_

_Fuck, was the first thing you thought._

_Fuckfuckfuck, was the second thing you thought._

_“I didn’t mean it like that.”_

_“I don’t know how else I was supposed to take it, honestly,” he said. And there was something in his eyes, something you hadn’t quite seen before, and the unfamiliarity of it was why it took you so long to realize what it was._

_Anger._

_“Look, I’m just… worried.”_

_He didn’t answer for a while, just drank his coffee slowly, made you helpless to do anything but watch as he did it._

_“I don’t need you to be worried for me,” he said. Didn’t yell the words, like you might have if you were angry enough. Didn’t appear any less calm than he usually was. But you saw the tiny crease between his eyebrows, the tension in his hand still clutching the empty cup even though he was done with the coffee. There was no way you could have missed it. “And I don’t need to have a relationship to be happy.”_

_You looked away. The intensity of his stare was too much._

_“I’m sorry.”_

_“Let’s just get out of here.” He got up and left the coffee shop without saying anything else._

_When you got back to the car, he didn’t seem angry anymore. In fact, it didn’t seem like anything had happened. He was the one who turned up the radio on a top 40 song and shouted the lyrics to it with the windows down. He was the one who laughed at your stupid jokes. By the time you were at his house, you could almost fool yourself into believing nothing had happened at all._

_You did try to bring it up again, once that day and once the next. Each time, you apologized for being so stupid, for not considering his feelings, for just being a shitty friend, and each time he just shook his head with a laugh and said it wasn’t a big deal, and it wasn’t an incident that should change anything between the two of you. You didn’t agree; it was the first time all the years you’d known him that you’d been so unthinkingly callous to him, and if it was significant enough to provoke such a reaction in him, then it was a big deal. You’d known each other for long enough that you could talk to each other about big deals, couldn’t you?_

_But he said nothing. Actually, it became a bit of an inside joke. You weren’t sure exactly how it happened, why whenever you brought it up he just smiled at you teasingly instead of reacting like that first time, but you figured maybe it just wasn’t in his nature to be angry._

_Regardless, you promised yourself you’d never upset him like that again._

- 

_12:16 PM_  
_To: GOD JONES  
_ _Can we talk?_

_12:22 PM_  
_From: GOD JONES  
_ _Where?_

_12:23 PM_  
_To: GOD JONES  
_ _After school? Courtyard?_

_12:47 PM_  
_From: GOD JONES_  
_Okay._

You don't know that you were afraid he wouldn’t show up until your insides flood with relief when he enters the courtyard. But when you really think about it, you wonder why you thought there was ever any reason to be.

He approaches you with a ghost of a smile directed at the ground, like he’s determined not to look at you. That’s fine; he can do what he wants. You’ve thought a lot about what you want to say to him, but not about how he’ll respond. You figure you don’t need to. Not with him.

“Hey, so first off I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” you start, no preamble.

That makes him look up at you. “Sorry?”

“We haven’t really – things have been – things have been weird. Lately. And it only recently occurred to me that the – weird – state of things might be causing me to neglect other things. Talking to you, for instance. I haven’t really been fair to you. I guess – I guess I just thought you were mad at me, and I thought you needed some space, but really, it’s kind of a shitty thing for me to stop talking to you entirely. So. Yeah. I’m sorry.”

As the speech leaves your mouth clumsily, you feel the urge to punch yourself in the face. It figures the one time it matters, your words desert you.

He blinks at you. “Oh.”

Your guts twist. “Listen,” you say, and you hate yourself a bit but you can just feel the plea seeping into your voice. Since when did you think begging Balthazar was actually necessary? “I’m not good at figuring out what people think or feel. But – I figure I should try to get better at that. So, what’s on your mind? Just tell me. Tell me if you’re mad at me.”

To your surprise, that makes him laugh. Not a laugh of malice or derision, or even of mirth; in fact, it almost sounds relieved.

“Ah, Pedro,” he says, shaking his head.

You frown. “What?"

“I’m sorry too,” he says. “That things’ve been weird. It’s just as much my fault as yours. Lots of things happening at the same time, yeah? But, uh, I’m glad we’re talking about it now. It's good, to talk about things with you.”

“Yeah,” you say, a small part of you warming with contentment to hear him say something like that. “Speaking of which, about what you said at Hero’s – “

“Hero’s birthday,” he interrupts. “Yeah. I should have mentioned this a while back, but…”

“Yeah?”

“But just because I’m not mad at you,” he says, “doesn’t mean I’m letting you off for what you and Claudio did to Hero that night.”

That is very much not where you were expecting him to go with that. “Excuse me?”

“I’m not taking sides, Pedro, I need you to know that,” he says, leaning forward, quiet but firm in his gaze. “And I know just about as much of the truth as anyone else, which is to say, we don’t really know much at all. But that includes you, too.”

Sharp pain pierces the skin of your palms. Without realizing, you’ve clenched your hand into a tight fist.

“That’s not really that neutral of a statement, Balthazar,” you say, as calmly as you can.

You stare at each other in silence, neither of you willing to back down.

“Okay,” he says at last. “If that’s what you think, I won’t say anything else. But you have to know I’m not going to just blindly accept everything that you do, if that’s what you want. That’s not how friendship works.”

The words cut you like a knife.

“That’s not – “

“I’m sorry, Pedro,” Balthazar says, and for a moment you can catch a glimpse of genuine sadness on his face.

And then he’s getting up, turning away from you, and you can’t see anything on his face at all.

“Don’t bother driving me home today,” he says.

And he’s gone.

“Goddammit,” you say to no one.

The drive home is wretched. You debate turning on the radio, but there’s no point if there’s no one there to enjoy it like Balthazar does. God, the silence was bad enough, but at least when he was there he _breathed_ , and it didn’t hit you just how much you associated the passenger seat of your truck with him until now. But no one else ever sat there, did they? It’s his seat. You didn’t know that you did, but you’ve thought that this whole time.

And he’s right, isn’t he? You’ve been taking his unconditional support, his perpetual presence, for granted this whole time. But you shouldn’t expect those things of anyone. And yet you did. Of him.

Funny, that you don't realize how much space things and people you like take up in your heart until they're gone.

“Fuck,” you whisper to yourself.

When you get home, the house seems eerily quiet, the silence as unsettling as the one in your truck.

“Hey,” you call up the stairs. “Anyone home?”

Parents will both be at work, but John is always home before you are. He keeps to his room, often blasting music before he realizes you’ve gotten back as well and has to grudgingly turn it down. Of course, now there’s nothing. Nothing but the sound of your thoughts.

“John?”

You take the stairs two at a time, knock on his door. Frown when there’s no response, and tentatively pry it open. Stare, when it swings back freely without protest.

No one is home, after all.

- 

_It's too late to say you're sorry_  
_Say you're sorry still_  
_I stepped out with heavy heart_  
_To bail you out again  
_ _Oh those things you do_


	7. The Very First Time, the Very Last

[ **VII. The Very First Time, the Very Last** ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FubvitXV_zM)

_So make all your last demands for I will forsake you  
_ _And I'll meet your eyes for the very first time, for the very last_

-

He calls you this time. Without thinking, you pick up on the first ring.

“It’s John,” he says, no greeting, no nothing. “John. He’s gone.”

Despite what you said to Pedro just a few hours ago, despite what’s happened in the last few weeks, despite everything, trepidation seizes your heart like ice. “What?”

You hear the crackle of a ragged sigh across the line. “I dunno. He’s not in his room. It’s an hour before midnight, he never leaves the house, and he’s gone. Won’t respond to any texts, any calls, won’t respond to anything. He’s gone, Balthazar.”

It’s not often that you feel like you have something worth saying, but right now you don’t have any words to say at all. There’s only silence in your heart and in your head. Like so much static.

“I suppose we’ll wait until tomorrow before we really consider him missing,” Pedro continues. His voice is deceptively calm; you know he must feel like he’s losing everything. “But I guess it’s better to worry more now than to not worry at all. I dunno. I just. Dunno.”

“Fuck,” you say shakily.

“Yeah.” Just one syllable. You can hear his voice shudder apart on the exhale.

He falls quiet, then, and the two of you stay like that for what feels like an earth-shatteringly long time.

In the car the next day, the air is heavier than it’s ever been before. Aside from the fact that you refused a ride from him yesterday, you can feel the weight of Pedro’s stress and worry like a physical presence.

“So I chucked up a video on Ben’s channel,” he says, unsmiling. “Dunno if it’ll do anything, but. It’s something, I guess.”

“Hey, right now there’s not much to do,” you say, careful not to write him off with a _you’ll be fine_. You are acutely aware of how much he hates that phrase. “It’s still pretty early. Your parents are gonna help you look, yeah? Do you need any help with a search party? I’m sure people’d be willing to help if you’d ask.”

“Yeah.” The car slows to a stop in front of a red light, and though he stares straight ahead you can still hear the helplessness in his voice. “But what if it’s already too late?”

You have nothing to say, to that.

You don’t see him for the rest of the day, seeing as you don’t have any classes with him, but you can’t help but worry. The material in the lectures today seems even more inconsequential than usual. What do dates and details matter when you can feel the threads that bind your group together swiftly unraveling?

In history, your last class of the day, Ursula sits hunched over her phone, her thumbs moving across the touchscreen frantically.

“Hey, everything all right?” you ask as you take your seat behind her.

“No, not really,” she replies, pushing her hair agitatedly out of her face.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s Verges and Dogberry.” She turns to face you, her eyes wide with shock. “They just recently uploaded this video – “

“Hold on,” you say. The look on her face alarms you; it’s rare to see her lose her composure like this. “What video? What’s going on?”

“I dunno! I’ve been letting them use my channel, but I haven’t really kept tabs on them for a while, and – they’re not responding to any of my messages – and God, their other footage, I should have been watching over them, what kind of a mentor am I, I really _really_ should have been, I can’t – “

“Hey, it’ll be okay,” you say, more calmly than you feel. You’re not really sure what’s going on, to be honest, but from the tone of her voice it can’t be good. “If you need to take some time, you can leave the class. I’ll talk to the teacher for you.”

“No, I’ll be fine, it’ll be fine.” She shoves her phone at you. “But – just watch the thing.”

About two minutes later, you put the phone slowly back on the desk.

“Jesus Christ,” you say.

“I know!” She snatches her phone back up, pulling up her contacts and scrolling through them like her life depends on it. “Like – what the _fuck_?”

You swallow. “Is she actually – “

“Hero? She responded to my texts a few hours ago… I dunno, but…”

“But you can never be sure.”

“Yeah.” There are tears in her eyes now.

“So what are you going to do?” What are _you_ going to do? It's not just the threads that have unraveled; the whole world is falling apart beneath your feet, and you are powerless to stop it.

Ursula takes a deep breath. Then another. At last, she seems like she’s calmed down.

“Well, first of all I really need to get in touch with them,” she says, typing into her phone. “I’ve already messaged them and commented on this video, but we need to get this sorted out as soon as possible before any unwarranted rumors start. We should find someone to get Claudio. And you need to talk to Pedro.”

Despite yourself, your breath hitches in your throat. “Talk to Pedro?”

She looks up at you, and for a moment you think she almost looks sad.

“Who else, Balthazar?” she says gently.

Well. She’s got a point there, doesn’t she?

Because you can’t even begin to imagine how Pedro must feel. Your heart aches, just thinking about it. Just thinking about how fucked up everything’s become. And you don’t know what the first or the right thing to say to him should be, you don’t even know if you could make the tiniest of differences to him, but you do know that you need to try. He’s worth it, your effort. Even though you have no idea if you can bridge the space he’s created with his actions between the two of you, he’s worth it.

At the end of school, you make your way to the parking lot. The car's never a great place to have a serious conversation, what with Pedro having to focus on the road and the wind blowing through the windows that are usually open, but maybe you can say something to him before he starts the engine up.

Honestly, you don’t even know why you’re surprised when you find he’s not there.

“Balthazar!”

You turn around to find Ben making his way toward you.

That’s right. You were going to help him with a song today. Between Pedro’s brother going missing and the new video, you completely forgot you made that promise.

“Hey, Ben,” you say. “You heard what’s going on?”

“With the video the year nines posted?” He shifts uncomfortably. “Yeah, I might’ve heard a word or two.”

“About Hero?” you press.

“Oh, Hero’s fine,” he says, and winces. “Well, not fine, per se, but, uh… she’s not dead. So she has that going for her.”

The relief hits you hard. You don’t think you believed it, to be honest, but the confirmation that one of your friends is still alive can’t be a bad thing.

“So, you ready to work on that song? I understand if you’re busy.” Ben looks pointedly at Pedro’s car.

You follow his gaze. “Nah, I said I would, didn’t I?”

You end up working on the song for the whole afternoon with Ben. By the end of it, you both decide you’re going nowhere with the lyrics, and he crumples up the sheet in his fist. You decide not to press him about the true source of his frustration.

“You need a lift home?” he asks as you walk to the parking lot with him.

Pedro’s truck is still there.

“Nah, I’m good,” you say. “See you tomorrow, Ben.”

“Yup,” he says, and with a dorky little salute Ben’s gone.

You turn away from the parking lot. Somehow, you have a feeling you know where Pedro will be.

-

_A week before Year 12 started, you found yourself in his room, listening to your music with one earbud in and staring aimlessly at the ceiling._

_“I don’t want to get drunk,” you said._

_“You don’t have to,” he said, pulling a beer out of the 6-pack on his desk and popping it open. “But seeing as we’re going to be Year 12’s in a week’s time, this is the ideal time to celebrate. You know, if I do say so myself.”_

_“You’re such a loser. Getting drunk in your room before midnight by yourself.”_

_“Hey now!” He threw a pillow at you. “I’m not by myself, thank you very much.”_

_“Such a compelling defense,” you answered, adjusting the volume on your iPod. It had switched to a song with lyrics you really liked, but it was a bit on the quiet side. “I’ve no choice but to declare you not a loser anymore. You’ve got me beaten.”_

_“No one believes me when I tell them how mean you are to me,” he said mournfully._

_“I think I’m bein’ perfectly civil to you right now.”_

_“Oh, sure,” he scoffed. “Play a game with me.”_

_“Okay. But I’m not playing Mario Kart. Not after last time.”_

_“It was a fair play!”_

_“You betrayed my trust. For good.”_

_“Anyway,” he said, waving his hands, “not a video game. Let’s play Never Have I Ever. You lose a round, you don’t have to do anything except put down fingers, but I lose a round, I drink. It’s a win-win situation.”_

_You rolled your eyes at him. What an idiot. But there was no saying no to him, there was never saying no to him. So you agreed, on the condition that he went first._

_“All right, let’s see.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Never have I ever been to the United States.”_

_“Me neither, man.”_

_“Well, fine,” he said, sticking his tongue out at you. “You come up with something, then, if you’re so clever.”_

_“Never have I ever dated a girl.”_

_“Oh my god,” he said._

_“Drink up.” You couldn’t help but laugh at him. He looked so_ offended _._

_“Unbelievable.” He glared at you as he drank._

_“Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”_

_“Fine,” he said. “Never have I ever dated a guy.”_

_You shrugged as you folded a finger down. “Your loss.”_

_“I hate you so much.”_

_“Never have I had any drugs other than alcohol.”_

_“Fuck,” he said._

_“Still wanna play?”_

_“More than anything,” he replied dryly, and took a swig._

_This time he took quite a while to think. Not like he couldn’t think of anything, it seemed to you. Like he couldn’t decide whether what he had to say was worth saying or not._

_Finally, he swore under his breath and said, “Never have I ever been kissed.”_

_That one threw you for a loop._

_“Really?”_

_“Don’t act so surprised,” he said, but you could tell he was a little hurt by your reaction. You couldn’t help yourself. The thought of anyone going out with Pedro Donaldson and not taking the first opportunity to kiss the living daylights out of him was nothing short of mind-boggling to you._

_“I’m sorry, it’s just…” You shook your head. “You’ve gone out with at least two or three girls at this point now, right?”_

_“Yeah,” he said, looking into his beer. “Few dates, here and there. But you know they weren’t anything serious.”_

_“Why?” you asked before you could stop yourself._

_“I dunno,” he sighed, putting the beer can down and falling back onto the floor, his arms crossed on his chest. “I guess… I just didn’t really have the opportunity.”_

_You chewed on your lip and took your earbuds out. "Do you want to?"_

_"Well, yeah," he said. "Of course I do. Who doesn't?"_

_“Okay,” you said. You were about to do something you would probably seriously regret in the morning. But that was what being sixteen was all about, right? Dumb mistakes and stupid chances taken. The important thing was that you didn’t regret it now. And anyway, he was probably drunk enough to let you._

_You crawled over to where he sat, and by the time he was aware enough to ask, “What are you doing?” you were close enough to kiss him._

_And so you did._

_It didn’t last any more than a second. You didn’t want to give him the wrong impression, make things too weird. But you bent down and you pressed your lips to his, and you figured in the context of the situation he wouldn’t ask any questions about why you would want to do such a thing._

_And he didn’t push you away. He actually_ let _you kiss him._

_When you pulled away, you smiled._

_“And now you have.”_

_He stared back in incomprehension._

_“Does this mean – “ he said falteringly._

_“It seems a shame to let the great Pedro Donaldson go a whole sixteen years without having kissed anyone,” you said. “So nah. It doesn’t. I just… wanted to make sure your first kiss was from someone you knew... someone you knew cared about you.”_

_For a moment, it seemed like he’d seen through you. Then he let himself collapse back and closed his eyes. You sat back with measured relief._

_It wasn’t the first time you’d kissed someone. But you wouldn’t mind if it was your last._

-

You find him on the roof of Messina High, knees drawn to his chest and staring into the setting sun.

“You’re still here,” he says without turning to look at you. It’s not a question.

“Got caught up with some music stuff with Ben,” you say. “Didn’t think you’d still be here yourself, but I saw your truck in the parking lot and I figured… Well, I figured I probably knew where I could find you.”

“You always do, don’t you.” He doesn’t move when you take a seat next to him, crossing your legs like the first time you were up here with him, but you can feel him tense up as you do so. Funny; that always felt like your thing.

“Hey, so I heard what happened earlier,” you say.

“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, we’ve got it pretty much cleared up now. I texted Beatrice about it and we had the truth within ten minutes. That’s all we have right now, isn’t it? The truth.” You’ve never heard him sound so bitter.

You don’t ask if he’s okay. You know what his answer would be if you did.

“She’s really sick right now, though,” he says softly.

“Yeah, I heard from Ben…”

“Fuck.” You look over just in time to see him put his face into his hands.

“I know what you’re thinking,” you say. “But it’s not – “

“Don’t,” he says, his voice muffled, “you dare.”

Yeah, it figures he’d say that.

“I’m sorry,” you opt for instead.

“So am I.”

It’s so frustrating, times like these, not knowing the right thing to say. Because everything you could tell him, he’ll just push away. You don’t want him to push you away. Not right now. Not ever.

“I can go,” you say. “If you want. To be alone, I mean.”

“No, stay, please. Stay,” he says emphatically, straightening up. “I’m sorry, I’m being such an ass right now, but… I just. I don’t know.”

It hurts your heart to see him feel so lost.

“You’re not being an ass,” you say.

“Easy for you to say,” he mutters.

“Okay, so what do you want me to say?”

“I dunno!” he bursts out. “I dunno. I dunno what I want anyone to say. I dunno what there is _to_ say. I’ve just – fucked up so _badly_. How could one person fuck up like this, Balthazar? I made this huge, horrible mistake, and every time I think about it I just think about how hard Hero was crying, how it just completely tore apart our group, and it’s _all my fault_. If I hadn’t been such an idiot – but this happens every time, doesn’t it? I’m such a _fucking_ idiot, a bloody mess, and other people have to pay the price for it. And now my brother’s gone. And that’s my fault, too. Because – you know how many times I’ve thought to myself I should have paid more attention to him? And every single fucking time, I always wrote it off. It’s John, he can take care of himself, I used to think. But that just isn’t right, is it? So this time, I was going to be different – maybe if I listened to him, maybe just this once, it might – but it turns out I can’t even treat my own brother right. My own brother, Balthazar!”

He brings his fists to his eyes, rubbing viciously. So young he looks right now, so boyish and so broken. You were not prepared to deal with this, to answer those words with anything but silence. What can you offer him, you think despairingly, but that?

“So,” he says, slowly, angrily, “I guess what I really want you to say or do or whatever is acknowledge – is to tell me to my face how shitty I am. Because if I had someone to tell me that, if I had _you_ to tell me that, it would mean that what I feel right now means something. You think the world of me, I know that, everyone knows that. But you shouldn’t. You really, really shouldn’t.”

He turns to you now, and in his eyes are a plea you almost wish you couldn’t ignore, it’s so strong.

“I’m not here to tell you how shitty you are,” you say.

The rawness of his emotion seems to desert him, then, and he has never seemed so small to you. “Why not? Heaven and hell know I deserve it.”

And here’s the thing about Pedro. Here’s the thing that made you realize how good his heart was, that made you hate him sometimes, that made you fall in love with him. His sense of responsibility, how keenly he feels for those around him, how readily he adopts other people’s hurt into his own, when he sees it. Every time you bear witness to it, it makes you love him more.

“You’re right,” you say. “What you did, you did, and what you’re feeling about it is valid. There’s no denying it. But… it doesn’t make you a bad person. You made some mistakes. So all you can do is to take responsibility for your actions. Own up to what you did. Realize people aren’t all good or all bad, realize your potential for them both. And learn from it. Everyone makes mistakes. Even you.”

“Even me,” he echoes. “Piece of shit extraordinaire.”

You chew your lip. “Look,” you say. “I can’t fix you, if that’s what you’re expecting of me. And even if I could, I wouldn’t want to. Because there’s nothing about you to fix. Not you, all around great guy.”

He snorts. The noise sounds like it’s coming from a wounded animal. “I fail to see what’s so great about me.”

“You care,” you say, as simply as you can put it. “You care so much. I think that’s the greatest thing in the world. Why would I want to fix that?”

He looks at you, then. And all you can do is to look back, and wonder what he can see in your eyes.

Finally, he looks away. And he doesn’t relax, exactly – you can still sense the tension in his shoulders acutely – but he seems calmer. Not totally at peace, but getting there. And that’s fine. That’s all you wanted to help him do. That’s all you can do.

“I told you I used to sneak up here a lot,” he says, his eyes fixed on the horizon. “Because people got to be too much. But I wasn’t talking about other people. I was… well, I guess I was mostly just talking about myself. I’d go up with this whole list of things that would’ve been building up for some time, just little things, you know, but all these things I worried or felt bad about. And I’d imagine taking all of those things and encasing each one of them in a bubble, and watching them float away. I liked that, the idea of making all my problems disappear into the sky. But it doesn’t work like that, does it? You don’t just let it go.”

You think about a younger Pedro, a Pedro who would sneak away from the world, a Pedro who felt like his feelings were enough of a burden not to talk to anyone about them. It makes you sad to think about that Pedro, and it makes you sad to think that that Pedro isn’t so far away today.

“You don’t just let it fester, either,” you say.

“No,” he sighs. “I suppose you don’t. But I can’t just – I dunno.”

“You don’t have to run away from it. But you don’t have to be consumed by it, either.”

He says nothing. You are content to follow suit, to watch the sun behind the trees. The day has been long, but it is about to end. You suppose that’s one of the few things you can depend on in life, in this world. Everything has an ending.

You used to be so scared of the idea. Frankly, you still might be. But after everything that’s happened, all the ending you’ve experienced and all the new, frightening feelings that have begun, maybe it’s not something you have to run away from either.

“Why?” he says suddenly.

“What?”

“Why did you come to talk to me?” Without looking, you can feel himself curl in on himself. “I get the sense that I’ve hurt you more times than I’ve hurt anyone.”

You could run away from this. You could take the safe way out and bury your secrets in hidden shame. You could leave him here on a rooftop that will be forgotten someday with your words scattered to the wind, and never have to worry about facing an ending you couldn’t bear.

“Because I care about you,” you say, quietly. “And because I know you'd never mean to hurt me. Or anyone, really.”

You look at him once more, for the very last time, you promise yourself, and he’s looking right at you. You can’t tell what he’s feeling; for once his expression is inscrutable to you. But you know he feels it deeply.

“I’m going to miss you,” he says finally. “When school’s over.”

“I’m going to miss you too.” It feels rather inadequate to answer that way after a conversation like this, when the feelings behind your words feel so dizzyingly deep, but none of the words you might say could match the words written on the walls of your heart, and you’ve long ago stopped trying.

“Thank you,” he says.

“Always here for you, man,” you say back.

You don’t need anything more than this. You never did. But no matter how many times you told it to yourself, you don’t think you fully realized it until now.

Loving Pedro Donaldson, the act itself, has never been pain. It was always what surrounded it. And here, in the quiet of understood thoughts and rediscovered peace, with everything else stripped away, you can see with startling, wildly beautiful clarity the truth you always knew but never quite believed.

So you sit next to him, almost close enough to touch but not quite, until the night steals away the sun and he gets up to leave.

And you follow him, and it is enough. It has always, always been enough.

- 

 _To be us to take this plunge, to forgive and forget  
_ _And be the better man, to be a better man, to be a better man_


	8. We've Been Waiting For It

[ **VIII. We’ve Been Waiting For It** ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55JUpfyPeg)

_All the words I said were wrong,_  
_They don't mean nothing to you_  
_All we had to do was touch,  
_ _And there's no nothing better_

-

It’s not a funeral, but it feels an awful lot like one, and you certainly have the guilt to go along with it.

By the end of it, all you want to do is go home and sleep for a few hours or ten. You’ve had enough drama to last you a lifetime, thank you very much. But as you stand in the parking lot, watching the others drive away, you know this is not something you can hide from under your blankets. It’s over, isn’t it? It’s over, but for you it’s far from it. For you, it might not ever be over.

_Men were always deceivers._

Maybe so. Maybe there’s no escape from it. But maybe you shouldn’t stop trying.

“Hey. Can I get a lift home?”

He stands a little behind you, forcing you to turn around to face him. He’s a mirror image of you, hands in pockets, staring at the ground. You get the sense that maybe that’s not the question he wants to ask you.

“Hey, Balthazar. I thought you came here with – “

“Yeah, I told her she could go home without me,” he says. “I saw Claudio leave with Hero, so I figured you’d have room for one more.” Shuffling his feet, adjusting his guitar strap. You don’t know why he ever doubted your answer.

“Sure, man,” you say, turning away. “Anything.”

There is silence in the car. Like always, he’s turned away from you and looking out the window with his hand in chin, and like always you can’t possibly discern the expression on his face. Things don’t feel quite mended between you; the silence feels fragile and filled with things unsaid, whole conversations that have been building up for months, maybe even years. But despite all that, you find yourself glad that he’s here, by your side. Just his presence is enough to make you feel better; you have the feeling that though you might not have known it, you’ve been drawing from his strength all along.

His hand rests on the seat next to his leg, palm facing up. With your eyes still on the road, one hand on the wheel, you reach over and put your fingers through the spaces between his.

You can feel him flinch at the contact, perhaps out of surprise, but he doesn’t look at you, and he doesn’t pull away.

You don’t either.

You pull into his driveway and turn the engine off, leaving quiet in its wake. The silence stretches on, and you don’t know about Balthazar but you don’t want to let go of him right now. Maybe you don’t even want to let go of him ever.

“Hey,” he says finally. “So… I’ve got a song Ursula wants to record in a few days. But, uh, well, I think I’d like you to see it right now. So… Do you want to come in?”

You turn to him in surprise. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” he says. He extricates his hand from yours and gets out the car. You have no choice, really, but to follow.

He sits on the couch in his room and pulls the guitar onto his lap in an easy, practiced motion, his hands going to the strings like they were always meant to be there. There’s no good place to sit in the room, but you’re content to lean against the wall and watch him start playing.

Honestly, the words don’t matter so much as the way he sings them. And God, the way he sings them is magnificent. He doesn’t look at you, focused on the fret board as he is, but he doesn’t need to. You can tell, from the shape of his words and the feelings in his voice, that what he’s offering to you right now is peace and comfort in a way he can’t express to you any other way.

You think about the time that has passed between now and the last time he played for you, and then about the time that has passed between then and the beginning of the school year. You think about how so much has changed between you and all the people around you, and you think that no matter how hard you try, it always comes back to this, to you and him, facing each other with the need to say something and the understanding to know not to. You think about universal changes and universal constants, and you wish with a sudden, fierce determination, as you stand there watching his fingers ghost over the strings of his guitar like he’s caressing an old lover, that you knew which category he fell under.

You know what you want him to be. And maybe that’s all you can really wish for.

“That was really something, man,” you say when he finishes.

“Yeah?” He grins at the floor as he removes the strap from around his neck.

“Yeah,” you say. There’s a lump in your throat; you’re not really sure how it got there. You swallow hard. “Listen, I’d really love to be there when Ursula records it.”

“Of course,” he says, and then he smiles, _really_ smiles at you, for the first time in months and ages. And for the first time in months and ages, you can actually feel your heart beat so hard it hurts to breathe.

“So,” you say, sticking your hands into your pockets. “I guess I’ll see you around, then.”

You think, with a faint fucked-up hope, that the look flashing across his face might be disappointment.

“Yeah,” he says. “See you around.”

The next week feels like a slowly healing wound, the pain and tension that have plagued your group these past few months taking their time to dissipate, but though the fractures that split apart your group left you in pieces, you all manage to find a way to put yourselves together again. You’re not whole, not yet, and things will probably never be like how they were before Hero’s sixteenth birthday. But it would be silly to expect them to be, to expect everyone to forget that easily, and anyway there’s not really much to complain about how things exactly are right now. You’ve all started eating lunch together again, and sometimes you even catch Beatrice laughing at one of your stupid jokes, though whenever she sees you looking at her she immediately pulls her face into a scowl. That’s fine; that’s nothing less than what you deserve, and honestly you think most of your friends are going easy on you. In any case, time presses forward, and for that you are grateful. Between you and the rest of the group, you feel like matters are…

If not good, if not like you haven’t messed everything up – which, for the record, you definitely have – then better.

You feel better around Balthazar, too. Better and at ease, like you haven’t felt in months.

“It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?” he says to you Friday afternoon. It’s after school and, due to a severe case of laziness that renders you unwilling to go home just yet, you find yourself sitting next to him under a tree facing a field. Some of your friends are playing with a frisbee – you can’t help but laugh when Ben throws it so far to the left that Beatrice has to sprint to retrieve it – but you’re too lazy for that too, right now, too lazy and a bit too preoccupied. “So lovely it makes you want to forget what rain is like.”

“Poetry,” you say. “I would expect nothing less from your brilliant mind.”

“You flatter me,” he says with a laugh.

“Nah. Just dealin’ the stone cold truth.”

“I’m serious, though,” he says. “You could almost forget everything that happened to us on a day like this.”

You purse your lips. “But of course you can’t.”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” he says, shaking his head vigorously. “I mean… well, I guess I mean it’s the kind of day you’d put together with a new beginning. Like, you’d want a sunny cloudless sky for something that’s just starting, wouldn’t you?”

“Is that what you want?” you say, somewhat confused. “A new beginning?”

He shrugs. “Not necessarily,” he says. “But maybe it’s what we need.”

Before you can ask him what he means, you see him look up. Someone’s approached the both of you.

“Ah, am I interrupting something?” Ursula says apologetically.

“Nah, nah, not at all,” Balthazar answers, smiling.

“Okay, well…” She tucks her hair behind her ears. “I just wanted to ask if you guys wanted to go to a picnic I’m having this weekend? I’m trying to get as much of the group together as possible. I just… I just figured it might be good to get together, one last time, before graduation.”

“Yeah, let’s do it,” you say. “That’s a really good idea, Ursula.”

She beams at you. “Brilliant,” she says. “I’ll go ask Bea and Ben now, but feel free to spread the word, if you catch anyone who wants to come.” With a small wave of her hand, she leaves, making her way into the violence that is the current game of frisbee between your friends.

“Is that what you were talking about?” you say, turning back to Balthazar.

“Sorry?”

“New beginnings.” You lean back against the tree, folding your arms behind your head. “Graduation’s coming up. Surely that’s the biggest new beginning of them all, isn’t it? The beginning of the rest of our lives.” The idea pleases you, being able to put all this behind you and starting in a new place with new people and clean hands.

You can tell, however, by his downward gaze, that Balthazar doesn’t agree.

“We’ve all grown so close, these last five years,” he says quietly. “But if five years is all it takes to form friendships like this, maybe another five years is all it’ll take to break them apart. Maybe in five years we’ll all be nothing but strangers to each other.”

He shakes his head then, changing the subject to some song he heard on the radio he thought you might like, but that doesn’t stop you from feeling ill at ease. It didn’t sound like he was talking about something he was afraid of happening; in fact, he spoke with a sense of resignation. Almost of inevitability.

His words stay with you that night, as you’re struggling to fall asleep. It’s true that you’ve been through so much together in just a few short years, but it’s also true that all it might take to undo that is distance and the slow, relentless passage of time. You don’t want that. You don’t want the memories you have with your friends to become meaningless to a jaded older version of you.

You don’t want Balthazar to be a shadow of your dreams you can barely remember when you wake up.

Regardless, on the morning of the picnic when you climb into cars and drive to a place you all know well, it’s hard to think that could ever happen to your group. The laughter and jokes seem to flow endlessly into each other, a river you float on gladly. Though the sky is overcast, nothing can dampen how light you feel inside. You can almost pretend to forget you have a reason to feel heavy.

John returns to you, that day. You embrace him, holding him as close as you can, because for almost a month you didn’t think you’d have that chance again.

You wait to talk to him until the group decides to move locations, when people are trying to pack stuff into cars. He leans against a fence, arms crossed over his chest, but you think he looks – not different, really, but more at peace with himself. And you’re infinitely glad for that, though you only wish you could have helped him along the way.

“Can I help you?” he says when you approach. In the past, he might have said it bitingly, but now you think he might be teasing you.

“I’m glad you’re back,” you say. 

“Yes, well.” You can’t really tell, but you think the corners of his lips might have twitched. “Hold your applause, I suppose.”

“Okay, so…” You run your hand through your hair, trying to be careful about what you say. “I know I can’t ever really make up for what I did to you, but I just wanted to make sure you knew I was sorry. For everything.” 

He sighs. “Typical. Someone else fucks up spectacularly, and you feel worse about it than they do. And you wonder why I hated you.”

‘Hated’. Past tense.

Even so. “I fucked up, too,” you say. “Spectacularly.”

He pauses. “Yeah,” he answers finally. “No sense in denying that.”

“I saw the video you posted,” you say. “I can’t – I didn’t realize. If I really was perfect, I would have been a better brother to you. So no, I don’t wonder. I know I was pretty shitty. Or at least, I know that now. We’ve lost… so much time, because of my mistakes. But I hope we can make up for at least some of it.”

“Funny,” John says. “That’s exactly how I feel.” The snarky exterior seems gone now, leaving behind something that almost feels like vulnerability.

You shake your head. “Look at us. If there was ever a pair of more fucked-up brothers, I can’t think of them.”

There’s a lull in the conversation for a few moments, as you struggle to come up with something to say. Nothing feels adequate after the note you’ve left it at. John, however, seems content to observe the others bustle around, and so you allow it to settle into silence.

“Can I ask you something?” he says suddenly.

You look to him. “Sure. Anything.”

“Why don’t you hate me?” He’s very matter-of-fact about it, all business and straight-faced, but you think there might be something else in his eyes. Shame? Pain? “I mean to say, why would you want me back?”

You shrug. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Pedro, I literally tried to mess up your whole life,” he says, looking down at his shoes. “That’s not something you should just brush off.”

The tone is different, but you’ve had this conversation before. You recognize that you’ve reached a critical point, when what you say matters more than anything else you could come up with.

“I guess I just don’t think you should push someone away just because you think they did something wrong, if you care about them,” you say. “People are rarely all bad, or all good. There’s no point in pretending otherwise.”

He’s quiet for a bit. You can tell he’s turning your words over in his mind, and though you don’t know if he’ll take them to heart, you think it was important that you said them, as much for your sake as it is for his. They are words you’ve tried to convince yourself were true for weeks, and maybe saying them out loud won’t help you believe them for yourself any more than if you just thought them but at least you can believe them for someone else. And maybe that’s all you need, for now.

“Wow.” John looks up at you, smiling ever so barely. “That was really good. You can’t have come up with that one on your own.”

You laugh softly. “No, I guess I didn’t.” You watch as Balthazar attempts to fold a blanket almost as big as he is, struggling with it against the wind, his hair whipping about violently. It would be so easy for him to ask someone else to help him, but he just works at it on his own, quietly and determinedly.

You can feel John follow your gaze. “Ah, I see. Someone who cares about you, indeed. Finally realized it, did you? Took you long enough.”

“Yeah.” As Balthazar holds up the blanket and the wind blows it so hard into his body he almost collides into Beatrice behind him, you can’t help but smile. “Reckon I’ve got a shot?”

John rolls his eyes. “I know you’re an idiot,” he says, “but don’t be stupid.”

Everything seems to be pretty much packed up, now. Balthazar slams a car trunk closed and turns back to you with a grin. “Pedro!” he calls out. “You comin’ or not?”

“Be right there,” you yell back, and turn back to John. “You sure you don’t want to come along?”

“No, no,” he says. “You all have your fun, I’ll be fine on my own.”

“I’ll save some cookies for you.”

“I won’t say no to that.” And finally he smiles, really and genuinely smiles; you don’t remember the last time you saw an expression like that on his face. You clap your hand on his shoulder one last time and turn away. It’ll be a long time, you suspect, before you can consider yourself a good brother to him, but this is a start, and you can’t ask for a better one.

You take your seat next to Balthazar in the back of Beatrice’s car. “Is he all right?” he says to you, nodding in John’s direction.

You look through the window at John’s tall figure making his way over a hill and, most likely, toward home. “We’re getting there,” you say. It’s the most honest answer you can give.

The rest of the afternoon passes in a happy blur. Someone throws a football into the field, and all of you jump into the fray with gusto. You have a ridiculous amount of fun teasing Balthazar when he tries to kick at the ball and misses by about half a foot, but can’t be unimpressed when he actually beats Claudio at his own game.

Hero pulls out yet another batch of cookies, and you dutifully wrap a few in a napkin for John.

Beatrice and Ben finally get their shit together. Everyone is happy for them, obviously. There’s at least two rounds of slow clapping.

The whole time, you can’t keep your eyes off of Balthazar. He’s radiant today, smiling like you haven’t seen him smile this year. You feel almost powerless in the face of his happiness to do anything but let it wash over you, to enjoy it and to take it all in. It occurs to you, at some point that day, that nothing makes you feel more content than when he is like this, unrestrainedly bright like the sun. You almost wonder how that could have possibly happened, though some part of you knows that you don’t have to.

So you have a truth of your own to tell. But no one asks you about it.

Maybe it’s up to you to make sure it’s known.

The thought terrifies you. But you know if there's one thing you have to get right in your lifetime, it's this.

-

_There were many times when he wandered through your dreams, but this time was different._

_He sat with his back against the wall in a room made of light and his stare turned to you._

_What are you waiting for? he asked._

_I don’t know, you answered._

_I’ll always wait for you, he said, but you’re sure taking your sweet time with this._

- 

 _5:12 PM_  
_To: GOD JONES  
_ _I need to talk to you about something._

_5:14 PM_  
_From: GOD JONES  
_ _Yeah?_

_5:15 PM_  
_To: GOD JONES  
_ _You should come to the party tonight._

_5:19 PM_  
_From: GOD JONES  
_ _Okay._

It is with a measure of relief that you are finally able to escape Ben’s merciless clutches. And with Balthazar in tow, no less! You count yourself a fortunate man. Until Balthazar starts laughing at you.

“Excuse me,” you say, mildly offended.

“I’m sorry, I just, ah. You looked so relieved.”

“That was horrible,” you groan. “You are the worst, the absolute worst, for going along with it.”

“Hey, now, can’t have been that bad,” he says, calming down enough to speak, though his voice still trembles with humor. “You’ve spent most of the year complaining about how single you are, now here’s your chance not to be. Honestly, you should be grateful. I think we’re doing you a service.”

“Har, har,” you say. For some stupid reason, his words make your heartbeat speed up. “I think I can manage on my own, thank you very much.”

“Yeah?” he says. “Is that right, prince charming?”

“What, is today ‘torture Pedro day’ or something? Are you all conspiring against me behind my back?” you demand as indignantly as you can.

“Sorry,” Balthazar says, finally settling into a semblance of seriousness, though the ghost of a smile lingers on his lips. “You wanted to talk to me about something?”

You sigh. “Well, do I really have to say it now? That’s basically as blatantly obvious as it could have gone. Who needs neon signs when you have Ben?”

He smiles at his feet. “Come on, Pedro. You can do better than that.”

Well. You suppose you could. And really, after all this time, he deserves it.

“Okay, fine,” you say. “Listen. I was thinking… Well, I’m a bit of an idiot, aren’t I? I’ve gotten this sense since the beginning of the year that I’ve been missing – something. And I didn’t know what. I spent months trying to figure it out, taking all these pieces and fitting them together in ways they didn’t fit, and nothing ever worked. So I guess I gave up. Though now I know I shouldn’t have.”

He shakes his head with a laugh. “I’m not entirely sure I know what you mean.”

“My point,” you say, “is that the thing I was missing this whole time is you.”

That grabs his attention. His gaze turns on you sharply.

“Not – you, per se,” you say quickly, gesturing to all of him. “You’ve always been there. But I didn’t realize it was you connecting everything together.”

“I…” He runs his hand through his hair like he doesn’t know what to say.

“And look, I know what you said about us graduating soon,” you say, pressing forward. “And you’re right. There’s no way of knowing if – if we’ll still be able to see each other after we leave high school. But… won’t the time we have together until then still mean something? And, I mean, you matter a lot to me. More than anything, I don’t want to lose you, in any capacity. It never really occurred to me, honestly, until this – this whole _clusterfuck_ happened, but it’s true. You’re always there, and I – I really want you to be. I think maybe I didn’t see it because I was scared. But maybe… maybe now I see it because I figured out that I don’t have to be.”

There’s no laughter or anything now. Just him looking at you, his eyes widening with every word you say.

“I like you,” you finish lamely. “A lot.”

The silence that follows makes you nervous. He keeps on staring at you, the expression on his face inscrutable, and your pulse feels so irregular it can’t be healthy.

“Well?” you finally say. “Are you going to – “

Balthazar surges forward and kisses you so hard you completely forget everything you were going to say.

You remember when he kissed you a year ago, soft and chaste, barely more than a brush against your skin. A gesture of goodwill rather than romance.

The way he kisses you now is completely different, fingers in hair and searing heat. Desperate and hungry, emotions that haven’t been released in years. You get the sense that he’s giving you everything he couldn’t since the song he sang for you, since the first time you got drunk, since the very first time you met, and you do your best to give it all back, because it’s everything and more that he deserves.

He pulls away, finally, curling his fists into your shirt and burrowing his face into the crook of your neck so thoroughly you almost miss it when he whispers against your skin, “You are a lot of an idiot.”

You press your face into his hair and hold him close. Because there’s no guarantee this will work past today, and there’s no guarantee you won’t fuck him up like you’ve seemed to do with everything else in your life.

But you are here with him now, and he fits into your arms like he was born to, and you no longer feel like you're missing anything at all.

- 

 _All day long we looked to fall,_  
_Looking into the sun,_  
_And found a way to get along  
_ _To be waitin’ for you_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note that I do not condone driving one-handedly. Please do not do this. Even if it is to hold the hand of a boy you think is cute.
> 
> Last part will be up tomorrow. Also, as the beginning notes are now slightly inaccurate, I've edited them in the interest of brevity and truth.


	9. Epilogue: The Birds Will Sing Our Song

[**E. The Birds Will Sing Our Song**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzlqJ_3kI9M) 

 _You're free_  
_A lover sinking in the sea_  
_And we_  
_Will let the water fill our lungs  
_ _And sleep_

-

No matter how many times you perform, actually getting on stage never fails to set your heartbeat skittering through your veins.

Which is why it is strange that it is ten minutes before your turn to go and you feel very much at peace with yourself, breathing even and pulse so regular you can’t even feel it. Though it’s not particularly difficult to guess the reason for it. In fact, if you squint hard enough, you’ll be able to see him sitting in the front row.

Pedro’s been to your shows before. All of them, actually. So things shouldn’t be different, but at the same time they definitely are.

You get on stage with your guitar in your hand, the lights in your eyes and the microphone making your voice too loud, and you’ve never felt more like you’re in the right place at the right time.

As your fingers stroke your guitar and you sing into the microphone, your memory wanders to the time you told Pedro you didn’t want a relationship without a deadline, and the time you offered him a kiss with nothing attached to it, and the time you let him go with a song. Pedro has always been an exception to your rules, hasn’t he? You were just so wrapped up trying not to show it that you let yourself be blind to it.

You catch his stare halfway through the show, his mouth open and his expression rapturous, and you think that maybe love doesn’t have to be fireworks in the night sky, or a fierce collision that sends sparks flying across frozen concrete. Maybe it can just be the flame of a candle, small but bright. Maybe it can just be two hands gently fitting together, a silent promise of forever.

And maybe it doesn’t have to be anything at all; maybe it can just be him and you, for as long as you can manage to hold on to each other.

After the gig’s over, you find your friends amidst the crowd and submit yourself to their praise. He waits patiently to the side, arms crossed across his chest, until everyone else’s attention has averted back to the stage for the next artist to go.

“Brilliant, as always,” he whispers to you, slipping his hand into yours.

“Thank you,” you whisper back. “My ego really needed the stroking.”

“I'll stroke it as much as it deserves. And other things, too, that need stroking.”

You roll your eyes, but inside you think there is probably little you could do to hide how stupidly happy you are _._

You’ve dreamed about this for years, about standing by his side and actually letting yourself do it. About singing for him, to him, alone in a crowded room. About loving him, openly and quietly and in your own way.

You think you don’t want to hide it, these small pleasures. And you think maybe you were living your dream all along.

-

You wake up before Balthazar does, like you usually do.

The morning sun is cruel to your sleepy eyes, but you fight back against it well enough to struggle out of bed and make your way to the kitchen. The two of you had a pretty late night, and you could really go for a pick-me-up.

The haze of exhaustion stubbornly refuses to fully leave your head, so you sluggishly toil through the tedium of filling the coffee pot with the necessary components. You sigh with relief once you’ve turned it on. All you have to do now is wait, and in just a few minutes salvation will be yours.

Balthazar’s been staying over at your house for the last week. It’s been pretty goddamned wonderful. Though it’s wreaked havoc on your sleeping schedule, you can’t really complain.

The beginning of you two coincides with the end, in a sense. You don’t know yet if you’ll have to go your separate ways; you and Balthazar haven’t exactly talked about it in depth. But at the same time, maybe you don’t need any more than this. Maybe what you have now is enough to get you through miles of distance. Maybe you don’t have to have an end.

You definitely don't like thinking about it, at least. The idea of a real end, honestly, is unfathomable and frightening and altogether very strange.

It’s strange to think of you and Balthazar having a beginning, either. It’s not true to say you began a week ago, is it? Really, you think you probably began the day you met a boy who wore a smile as big as his sweaters.

The machine does that annoying beeping thing that it does when it wants to tell you it’s finished doing its dirty work. Eagerly, you grab a mug and pour the coffee pot’s heavenly contents into it. You usually take it black, when you have to take it at all, so all you have to do now is to wait for it to cool off and –

“Coffee.”

You whirl around more out of surprise than anything else. The door swings open, and there Balthazar stands. He shuffles into the kitchen, eyes barely open and hair a cloudy mess, takes the cup from you, and sits down at the table. The sleeves of his jumper are long enough to cover most of his hands, and he only has one sock on.

Honestly, you can’t even be mad at someone who is this adorable.

“Morning,” you say, making your way to him so you can hug him.

Predictably, he does not answer, even as you pull away and sit next to him, only brings the cup to his lips and downs its steaming contents in one go. You can’t help but be impressed.

When he finally brings the cup down from his face, he smiles and answers, “Morning.” You two have had this exchange probably dozens of times in the past, but this is the first time you notice how when the sun spills over the windowsill, softening the edge of his jawline and shining dully in his hair, it sets his eyes on fire when he turns his gaze to you. You are struck, suddenly, and overwhelmed, by how beautiful Balthazar is, in the morning light and every other time of day.

You clear your throat. “Hey,” you say. “Can I ask you something?”

He gets up to refill his coffee. The boy is insatiable, to be honest. “Of course,” he says over his shoulder.

“Um… When did you know that you liked me?”

You feel as if you should be blushing, if you aren’t already.

“Oh. Hm.” You turn around to face him as he leans back against the counter, contemplatively staring at the curls of steam emanating from his cup. “Well, I guess I don’t really know.”

You stare at him. “Really.”

He nods, sipping at his coffee. “It’s like I was trying to tell you. It kind of just. Snuck up on me. I didn’t just wake up one morning and realized, y’know? It all felt very casual. Very… natural. Like I was supposed to.”

“So why didn’t you say anything?” you say quietly.

He shrugs, smiling at his hands.

“I guess… Well, in a sense, we were already together, weren’t we?”

He sets the cup on the counter and walks toward you. His smile, the smile that hasn’t left his face for the last week, is almost blinding. It does not fall away as he places his hands on your shoulders and presses himself close to you, close enough to hear his whisper.

“I didn’t need much more than that.”

When he kisses you, the vague, breathless sense of a finished race flashes through your mind before the feeling of his lips on yours drowns your loud thoughts out.

- 

 _Love, we go down, we go down_  
_Breathe, it's over now, over now_  
_We can love, we can love_  
_We can love, we can love  
_ _And the birds will sing our song in Halcyon_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lord, I'm finally done with this thing.
> 
> Thank you to all the songs and their writers I gratuitously borrowed chapter titles and lyrics from. And thank you to you, for making it this far. I appreciate it more than I can say.
> 
> And now for a shameless plug. Come say [hi.](http://douchenuts.tumblr.com)
> 
> 4/16 - So in the midst of procrastination I decided to throw together a playlist of the songs that I appropriated for the fic, which can be found [here](http://8tracks.com/douchenuts/alone-by-your-side-i-was-flying) if anyone is interested. I've also made a number of small edits [I wouldn't bother looking for them]. Ideally this will be the last time that I look at this fic so if there are still any typos or things that look like typos left let's just assume they were intentional and leave it at that.


End file.
